Publication Date:
2015-11-14
Description:
Following the end-Devonian mass extinction (359 million years ago), vertebrates experienced persistent reductions in body size for at least 36 million years. Global shrinkage was not related to oxygen or temperature, which suggests that ecological drivers played a key role in determining the length and direction of size trends. Small, fast-breeding ray-finned fishes, sharks, and tetrapods, most under 1 meter in length from snout to tail, radiated to dominate postextinction ecosystems and vertebrae biodiversity. The few large-bodied, slow-breeding survivors failed to diversify, facing extinction despite earlier evolutionary success. Thus, the recovery interval resembled modern ecological successions in terms of active selection on size and related life histories. Disruption of global vertebrate, and particularly fish, biotas may commonly lead to widespread, long-term reduction in body size, structuring future biodiversity.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Sallan, Lauren -- Galimberti, Andrew K -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Nov 13;350(6262):812-5. doi: 10.1126/science.aac7373.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. lsallan@sas.upenn.edu. ; Department of Biology, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI 49006, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26564854" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Biodiversity
;
*Biological Evolution
;
*Body Size
;
Extinction, Biological
;
Fishes/*anatomy & histology
;
Tail/anatomy & histology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink
