Article Synopsis
- Body size significantly impacts mammalian ecology and physiology, with many species decreasing in size during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).
- A study reveals that equid body sizes shrank by about 30% over the first 130,000 years of the PETM, followed by a recovery phase where sizes increased by approximately 76%.
- These size changes correlate negatively with temperature variations, suggesting they were influenced by climate shifts and heightened CO2 levels, which may provide insight into how mammals could respond to future climate change.
Video Abstracts
Category Ranking
98%
Total Visits
921
Avg Visit Duration
2 minutes
Citations
20
Article Abstract
Body size plays a critical role in mammalian ecology and physiology. Previous research has shown that many mammals became smaller during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), but the timing and magnitude of that change relative to climate change have been unclear. A high-resolution record of continental climate and equid body size change shows a directional size decrease of ~30% over the first ~130,000 years of the PETM, followed by a ~76% increase in the recovery phase of the PETM. These size changes are negatively correlated with temperature inferred from oxygen isotopes in mammal teeth and were probably driven by shifts in temperature and possibly high atmospheric CO(2) concentrations. These findings could be important for understanding mammalian evolutionary responses to future global warming.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1213859 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
A comprehensive evaluation framework for climate effect on plant viewing activities.
Int J Biometeorol
September 2025
Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China.
Plant viewing activities, which encompass the enjoyment of seasonal plant phenomena such as flowering and autumn leaf coloration, have become popular worldwide. Plant viewing activities are increasingly challenged by climate change, as key components like plant phenology and climate comfort are highly sensitive to global warming. However, few studies have explored the impact of climate change on viewing activities, particularly from an integrated, multi-factor perspective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTracing priming effects in palsa peat carbon dynamics using a stable isotope-assisted metabolomics approach.
Front Mol Biosci
August 2025
Department of Environmental Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States.
Introduction: Peatlands store up to a third of global soil carbon, and in high latitudes their litter inputs are increasing and changing in composition under climate change. Although litter significantly influences peatland carbon and nutrient dynamics by changing the overall lability of peatland organic matter, the physicochemical mechanisms of this impact-and thus its full scope-remain poorly understood.
Methods: We applied multimodal metabolomics (UPLC-HRMS, H NMR) paired with C Stable Isotope-Assisted Metabolomics (SIAM) to track litter carbon and its potential priming effects on both existing soil organic matter and carbon gas emissions.
Metabolomic profiling reveals that the heterogeneity of microhabitats can assist intertidal mollusks in surviving extreme cold events.
Mar Life Sci Technol
August 2025
Key Laboratory of Mariculture of Ministry of Education, Fisheries College, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266003 China.
Unlabelled: Microhabitat heterogeneity results in significant variations in the thermal environment on a small spatial scale, leading to different intensities of cold stress during extreme low-temperature events. Investigating variations in body temperature and metabolomic responses of organisms inhabiting different microhabitats emerges as an important task for understanding how organisms respond to more frequent extreme low-temperature events in the face of climate change. In the present study, we measured substrate temperature, air temperature, wind speed, light intensity, and body temperature to evaluate the relative importance of drivers that affect body temperature in different microhabitats, and determined the metabolomic responses of intertidal snails and limpets from different microhabitats (snail: exposed vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA diffusion-based integrative approach for culturing previously uncultured bacteria from marine sediments.
Mar Life Sci Technol
August 2025
State Key Laboratory of Microbial Metabolism, School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240 China.
Unlabelled: Traditional cultivation methods with defined growth media can only isolate and cultivate a small number of microbes. However, much higher microbial diversity has been detected by cultivation-independent tools from a range of natural ecosystems. These represent a large unexplored pool of potentially novel taxa.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntegrating the thermal dependence of sex ratio into distribution models to predict suitable habitats for the invasive freshwater pond slider turtle, .
Mar Life Sci Technol
August 2025
Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101 China.
Unlabelled: Biological invasions represent one of the main anthropogenic drivers of global change with a substantial impact on biodiversity. Traditional studies predict invasion risk based on the correlation between species' distribution and environmental factors, with little attention to the potential contribution of physiological factors. In this study, we incorporated temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) and sex-ratio data into species distribution models (SDMs) to assess the current and future suitable habitats for the world's worst invasive reptile species, the pond slider turtle ().
View Article and Find Full Text PDF