Extinct animals

Why don't either the Sharp Ian's or Arcaniuns find extinct animals such as mammoths or Dodo birds or passenger pigeons that became extinct due to humans?

Yulerule wrote:Why don't either the Sharp Ian's or Arcaniuns find extinct animals such as mammoths or Dodo birds or passenger pigeons that became extinct due to humans?

because it's not important to the story.

For all we know, they have. Neither group has appeared in the books, so we don't have any information about their activities.

More seriously, for all we know they have found extinct species by the bucket load. 99%+ of them would be irrelevant to the story and shouldn't even get a mention unless one of the authors wants to show off. Only the North American megafauna would have had any reason to appear, since they would be even more attractive to hunting dragons than the bison that are in the text. The problem is that correlation isn't proof of causation, and that is really all that we have to link human activity with the disappearance of the megafauna. Even if, as I tend to, you favour the hypothesis that we killed them, all that that shows is that we caused it to happen _at_that_time_ - and I'm inclined to think that it would have happened in any case within 5-6000 years of when it did occur. By that time the accumulated climatic and environmental changes would be enough to account for their disappearance, so the authors aren't unjustified in assuming they're still gone. There's also the fact that it turns out that there is _some_ variation from universe to universe, which could translate to variations in extinctions. So the megafauna are still there in Traisum, say, but not in [IIRC] Thermyn, where the dragons are hunting.

Yulerule wrote:Why don't either the Sharp Ian's or Arcaniuns find extinct animals such as mammoths or Dodo birds or passenger pigeons that became extinct due to humans?