A Tiny Horse That Got Even

Tinier as the Planet Heated Up

Rising seas, killer storms, droughts, extinctions and money wasted on snowblowers
are not the only things to worry about on a warming planet. There is also the
shrinking issue.
It happened to Sifrhippus, the first horse, 56 million years ago. Sifrhippus shrank
from about 12 pounds average weight to about eight and a half pounds as the
climate warmed over thousands of years, a team of researchers reported in the
journal Science on Thursday.
The horse (siff-RIP-us, if you have to say the name out loud) lived in what is still
horse country, in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, where wild mustangs roam.
Sifrhippus was not much like the mustangs or any other modern horses. It was the
size of a cat, ate leaves rather than grass and counts as a horse only in scientific
classification. It might have made a nice pet if anyone had been around to
domesticate it, but the first hominids were a good 50 million years in the future.
Its preserved fossils, abundant in the Bighorn Basin, provide an excellent record of
its size change over a 175,000-year warm period in the Earths history known as the
Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures are estimated to have
risen by 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit at the start, and dropped again at the end.
Scientists have known that many mammals appear to have shrunk during the
warming period, and the phenomenon fits well with what is known as Bergmanns
rule, which says, roughly, that mammals of a given genus or species are smaller in
hotter climates.

Although the rule refers to differences in location, it seemed also to apply to

changes over time. But fine enough detail was lacking until now.
In Science, Ross Secord, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Jonathan Bloch, of
the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville;
and a team of other researchers report on the collection and analysis of Sifrhippus
fossils from the Bighorn Basin.
They report that the little horse got 30 percent smaller over the first 130,000 years,
and then as always seems to happen with weight loss shot back up and got 75
percent bigger over the next 45,000 years.
Using fine-grained detail on both climate and body size, the researchers concluded
that the change in size was, as suspected, driven primarily by the warming trend.
It seems to be natural selection, said Dr. Secord. He said animals evolved to be
smaller during warming because smaller animals did better in that environment,
perhaps because the smaller an animal is, the easier it is to shed excess heat.
Paul L. Koch, head of the department of earth and planetary sciences at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, and a specialist in reconstructing ecosystems
and climates from many millions of years ago, said, The paper lets us see the effect
of warming on mammals where the climate change is really large.
Dr. Koch, who was not involved in the study, said he thought that the question of
whether natural selection was the cause of the changes was still open, and that the
disruption of ecosystems during the warming period might have led smaller
animals to migrate to new locations.
The current warming period is occurring on a scale of hundreds of years, not
thousands, and scientists can only speculate on whether modern mammals will
shrink.
Its difficult to say that mammals are going to respond in the same way now, Dr.
Secord said. If I had to guess, he said, he thinks some will get smaller. And, he
said, some studies have shown some birds to be getting smaller in response to
warming.
If warming continues at the highest rate projected, he said, theres another
question: Can mammals keep up?