Climate change and mountain building led to mammal diversity patterns
Crossposted to ontd_science here.
Examiner.com: U of M scientists find climate change, mountain building led to mammal diversity patterns
by Vince Lamb, Detroit Science News Examiner
Travel from the Equator to the one of the poles and one finds that the climate becomes colder and harsher. During that same journey from the tropics to the Arctic (or Antarctic, as the case may be), one would also notice that biodiversity (the number of species of animals and plants) also decreases along with the average temperature. Based on that relationship between temperature and biodiversity, one might also expect biodiversity to decrease as one climbs from the lowlands into the mountains. That hypothesis has been shown to be wrong; biodiversity generally increases at first, then decreases as one scales a mountain range. Furthermore, mountain ranges make the landscape more complex, increasing biodiversity.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, University of Michigan paleontologists John A. Finarelli and Catherine Badgley have found that the current relationship between mountains and biodiversity has not always held. Instead, they suggest that the elevational patterns of diversity we see today have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared over Earth's history and that these patterns arose from interactions between climate change and mountain building.
Finarelli and Badgley performed their analysis by comparing changes in rodent diversity between the geologically quiet Great Plains and the geologically active region from the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains west to the Pacific Ocean during the Miocene Epoch, which began 25 million years ago and ended 5 million years ago. They looked at the records of 418 species of rodents described from the Miocene rocks of the two regions. They found that, while the times of increased diversification and extinction were different between the Great Plains and the western mountains, the total number of species, speciation rate, and extinction rate per million years were not significantly different between the two areas during the 20 million year interval.
More at the source in the headline.
Personal note: While I was a grad student at U of M, Dr. Badgley was a post-doc in the Museum of Paleontology. I'm glad to see that she got a tenure-track job, especially at U of M.
Examiner.com: U of M scientists find climate change, mountain building led to mammal diversity patterns
by Vince Lamb, Detroit Science News Examiner
Travel from the Equator to the one of the poles and one finds that the climate becomes colder and harsher. During that same journey from the tropics to the Arctic (or Antarctic, as the case may be), one would also notice that biodiversity (the number of species of animals and plants) also decreases along with the average temperature. Based on that relationship between temperature and biodiversity, one might also expect biodiversity to decrease as one climbs from the lowlands into the mountains. That hypothesis has been shown to be wrong; biodiversity generally increases at first, then decreases as one scales a mountain range. Furthermore, mountain ranges make the landscape more complex, increasing biodiversity.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, University of Michigan paleontologists John A. Finarelli and Catherine Badgley have found that the current relationship between mountains and biodiversity has not always held. Instead, they suggest that the elevational patterns of diversity we see today have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared over Earth's history and that these patterns arose from interactions between climate change and mountain building.
Finarelli and Badgley performed their analysis by comparing changes in rodent diversity between the geologically quiet Great Plains and the geologically active region from the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains west to the Pacific Ocean during the Miocene Epoch, which began 25 million years ago and ended 5 million years ago. They looked at the records of 418 species of rodents described from the Miocene rocks of the two regions. They found that, while the times of increased diversification and extinction were different between the Great Plains and the western mountains, the total number of species, speciation rate, and extinction rate per million years were not significantly different between the two areas during the 20 million year interval.
More at the source in the headline.
Personal note: While I was a grad student at U of M, Dr. Badgley was a post-doc in the Museum of Paleontology. I'm glad to see that she got a tenure-track job, especially at U of M.