We all know that the Maltese Islands featured its own special miniaturized ‘megafauna’, with pygmy elephants and giant swans roaming a landscape we would struggle to recognise today. But when did these animals die out, and why? How many of them really lived alongside one another? Where did they come from, and what were the ecological consequences of their loss?

Through a prestigious National Geographic Grant, Prof. Eleanor Scerri, a Maltese scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Germany, and the University of Malta‘s Department of Classics and Archaeology, hopes to address these questions. The grant, one of only ten awarded globally, follows on from a 1.5-million-euro European Research Grant, to invest in an ongoing programme of research that is transforming what we know about the deep past of our islands. Prof. Scerri, together with expert colleagues at the University of Malta, Heritage Malta (Natural History), and the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, is investigating Maltese natural history and the transformation from pristine natural systems to human dominated landscapes. As a National Geographic explorer, Prof. Scerri aims to invest yet more of her energies and scientific focus on the Maltese Islands.

“Malta has a unique history,” explains Prof. Scerri, “it featured a unique iconic miniaturized megafauna, but we still know very little about these animals. We’d like to clarify when these animals lived, which ones lived at the same time, and why they died out. We’d also like to understand the ecosystem impacts of the loss of these animals, and later on, when humans arrived, how they began to transform landscapes and ecosystems. This investment in our research programme will allow us to answer these questions.”

As the work of Prof Scerri and her team of scientists and collaborators work together to address these issues, Prof. Scerri, together with Prof. Nicholas Vella of the University of Malta’s Classics and Archaeology Department, have organised a flagship conference in order to disseminate results with both the public and the global scientific community. Funded by the University of Malta’s Research Innovation and Development Trust (RIDT) and the Max Planck Institute, the conference is entitled “Island Legacies: Prehistoric Insular Ecosystems, Societies, and Climate Change in the Mediterranean”. The conference will bring together internationally leading scientists and researchers working on similar questions across all Mediterranean Islands, with the goal of using knowledge of the past to bring to bear on present challenges being faced by Mediterranean island communities.

“We hope to be able to share the first results of our work at the conference,” says Prof. Scerri. “Scientific work takes a long time as it involves a lot of independent analyses to either verify or reject a hypothesis. However, our research programme is starting to deliver. New investment from the National Geographic Society will allow us to further expand and conduct new cutting-edge scientific analysis that will begin to clarify what is currently a rather murky deep time past of the Maltese Islands. We’re very excited to see what this will reveal, and how it can help to mitigate the local effects of the current climate and biodiversity crisis.”

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Further details regarding the conference will be shared closer to the date on the below link.

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