The earth is hot, the animals are small

Fossil bone fragment of Palaeonictis wingi. (Photo: Internet).

Palaeonictis wingi , which is a hyena-like animal, evolved from a bear's stature to the size of a coyote wolf during a 200,000-year period when the average Earth's temperature rose. up to about 15 degrees Farenheit. Following this warming, the Earth's temperature dropped and evolution evolved to make it bigger.

The author of the study is Stephen Chester, a doctoral student at Yale University, in collaboration with school museum scientist Jonathan Bloch, a vertebrate paleontologist from the Florida Museum. . "We have shown that carnivores are diminishing in the Eocene century, a period of global warming, involving an increase in atmospheric CO _{2 levels,} " he said.

They discovered a complete set of jaws of a Palaeonitis wingi in Wyoming (USA) while excavating fossils. Their new findings have helped scientists better understand the impact of global warming currently taking place in our time.

Bloch has been studying climate change for over a decade, saying: " The effects of past global climate change tell us what will happen to animals in the near future. " .

Knowing that CO ₂ has increased, the environment is drier, but scientists still have not figured out what caused the animals to shrink. One theory is that high levels of CO ₂ cause nutrients in plants to decrease and animals must be smaller to adapt.

But animals used as evidence for this hypothesis are not plant-eating species, but carnivores. Therefore, nutrients in plants are not the only reason. Even today, hot land animals - where plants are richer - are still smaller than cold-land animals, for example brown bears in Montana smaller than bears in Alaska have contradicted the hypothesis.

A reasonable explanation must wait for more convincing evidence of later findings.