Sentences with phrase «large modern mammals»
As no other taxonomic group contains terrestrial animals in the size classes of the large modern mammals, the functional loss of large mammals can rarely be compensated, leading to permanent ecosystem changes [49].
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/ Not exact matches
In a paper published in the journal Systematic Biology and delivered at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution Conference this week, Dr Phillips said biases in models of DNA evolution inflated estimates of when modern mammals, which were once no larger than a guinea pig, diversified and evolved into the animals familiar to us today.
If the extinction trend continues apace, modern elephants, rhinos, giraffes, hippos, bison, tigers and many more large mammals will soon disappear as well, as the primary threats from humans have expanded from overhunting, poaching or other types of killing to include indirect processes such as habitat loss and fragmentation.
Earth's climate was transitioning from greenhouse to icehouse, and the ancestors of modern reptiles and mammals (as well as the precursors of dinosaurs) had begun to emerge from earlier large amphibians.
Small mammals and reptiles can be very diverse and abundant in modern ecosystems, but small dinosaurs (less than 100 kg) are considerably less common than large ones in the fossil record.
The role of ancient and modern humans on large mammals has been vastly underappreciated researchers say.
One hypothesis suggests that Neandertals were rigid in their dietary choice, targeting large herbivorous mammals, such as horse, bison and mammoths, while modern humans also exploited a wider diversity of dietary resources, including fish.
Modern conservation efforts tend to center around large animals — such as tigers, elephants, and wolves — and top predators in peril, while Roopnarine and Angielczyk show that small amniotes (reptiles and ancient mammal relatives) were most vulnerable during the early phase of this long - ago period of extinction.
A large mammal ancestor that ultimately gave rise to all modern mammal groups, including the rodents, might simply have failed to fossilise.
The authors suspect that the presence of big teeth in fossil sperm whales may suggest that they were feeding on large prey, perhaps marine mammals such as seals and other smaller whales as opposed to modern sperm whales, which feed primarily on squid, hardly using their teeth for chewing.
The new species, Hadrocodium wui, had a precociously large brain and the middle ear typical of modern mammals.
Perhaps as early as 3.4 million years ago, the modern human ancestor Australopithecus afarensis was using stone tools to strip meat from the bones of large mammals.