The late Pleistocene deposits of Equus Cave, northern Cape Province, South Africa, have provided more than 30,000 taxonomically identifiable mammal bones from 48 species. Context, associations, and features of the bone assemblage implicate brown hyenas as the main accumulators. The fauna is significant mainly because (1) it supplements previous evidence that regional climate was cooler and possibly also somewhat moister during part(s) of the late Pleistocene, but deviated less from the historic norm than in areas farther south; (2) it shows that Bond's springbok, which became extinct in the early Holocene, differed from the surviving common springbok not only in important morphological respects but also in reproductive pattern; and (3) it sustains earlier suggestions that an abundance of carnivores, a paucity of small hard bones, and increase in the cranial/postcranial ratio with species size, and exclusively attritional mortality profiles are features that tend to differentiate assemblages accumulated by brown hyenas from those accumulated by people. In addition, pending firmer dating, the fragmentary human fossils from Equus Cave may support an exclusively African origin for anatomically modern humans.

Salvage excavations of a nearly complete and remarkably well-preserved skeleton of an American mastodont (Mammut americanum) in Licking County, Ohio, yielded a discrete, cylindrical mass of plant material found in association with articulated vertebrae and associated ribs. This material is interpreted as intestinal contents of the mastodont and paleobotanical analyses indicate that the mastodont diet included significant amounts of low, herbaceous vegetation. Enteric bacteria (Enterobacter cloacae), isolated from a sample of this material, are believed to represent survivors or descendants of the intestinal microflora of the mastodont. This is the first report of the isolation of bacteria associated with late Pleistocene megafauna.

Eleven conventional and 15 AMS (accelerator mass spectrometer) radiocarbon dates establish chronologies for nine Holocene vertebrate fossil sites in the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. A Holocene fossil record approaching 500,000 bones, more than 90% of which predate the arrival of people, shows that most or all cases of extinction or extirpation in the Galápagos occurred after first human contact in AD 1535. This is especially significant for two species of large rodents (Megaoryzomys spp.) that are known only from bones found in lava tubes. The highest rate of background (prehuman) extinction interpreted from the Galápagos fossil record is probably hundreds of times less than the modern rate of human-related extinction.