Global warming led to dwarfism in mammals

Mammal body size decreased significantly during at least two ancient global warming events millions of years ago, a new study has found.
A similar outcome is possible in response to human-caused climate change, according to a University of Michigan paleontologist and his colleagues.
Researchers have known for years that mammals such as primates and the groups that include horses and deer became much smaller during a period of warming, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), about 55 million years ago.
Now, Philip Gingerich and his colleagues have found evidence that mammalian "dwarfing" also occurred during a separate, smaller global warming event that occurred about 2 million years after the PETM, around 53 million years ago.

"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 Gingerich, a professor of earth and environmental sciences.
Researchers concluded that decreased body size "seems to be a common evolutionary response" by mammals to extreme global warming events, known as hyperthermals, "and thus may be a predictable natural response for some lineages to future global warming."

The PETM lasted about 160,000 years, and global temperatures rose an estimated 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit at its peak.

The smaller, later event analysed in the latest study, known as ETM2 (Eocene Thermal Maximum 2), lasted 80,000 to 100,000 years and resulted in a peak temperature increase of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
Teeth and jaw fossils of early hoofed mammals and primates that spanned this later climatic event were collected in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin, and the size of molar teeth was used as a proxy for body size.
The researchers found that body size decreased during ETM2, but not as much as the dwarfism seen in PETM fossils.
For example, the study revealed that a lineage of early horses the size of a small dog, called Hyracotherium, experienced a body-size decrease of about 19 per cent during ETM2.

The same horse lineage showed a body-size decrease of about 30 per cent during the PETM. After both events, the animals rebounded to their pre-warming size.
The study was presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Los Angeles.