Speaker: Abigail Carroll, University of Pittsburgh.
How might animals and ecosystems respond to today’s warming planet? Looking to Earth’s past may help us answer this question. A series of extreme warming events during the early Eocene (beginning 56 million years ago) are analogous in many ways to present-day global warming. Paleontological investigations conducted over the past decade have also uncovered a curious response to these warming events: a brief, but significant, decrease in body size for some mammal groups, including the earliest horses. Furthermore, the extent of body size decrease appears to be related to the magnitude of the warming event. In this talk, we will look at a fossil record of these events from the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, and consider the mechanism(s) which may have led to the observed body size changes.
This event will take place Monday, November 13, 2023 at Noon in person at Earth Theater and is free to attend.
