Animals could shrink with climate change

Animals could shrink with climate change
Global warming could lead to dwarfism in animals, according to new international research.

Fossil evidence shows many mammals became significantly smaller during ancient warming events, and now scientists are predicting the same thing could happen in response to clim­ate change caused by humans.

Palaeontologists had long known that early ancestors of monkeys, horses and deer showed a dramatic decrease in size during a period of warming called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred around 55 million years ago, but the latest studies show “dwarfing” in mammals also occurred during a smaller event two million years later.

“The fact that it happened twice significantly increases our confidence that we’re seeing cause and effect, that one interesting response to global warming in the past was a substantial decrease in body size in mammalian species,” said Philip Gingerich of Michigan University, a professor of earth and environmental sciences.

The team concluded that reduced body size seems to be a “common evolutionary response” by mammals to extreme global warming events known as hyperthermals, and so may be “a predictable natural response for some lineages to future global warming”....

http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/animals-could-shrink-with-climate-change-1-3169828