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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This is a 5 page paper that provides an overview of climate change and evolutionary changes. The example of sifrhippus is explored in depth. Bibliography lists 4 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: KW60_KFsci022.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
purely as the result of internal forces, but rather, these changes are typically instigated by internal responses to external forces. For instance, the availability of one type of food over
another in an environment might affect the evolutionary development of bird beak types, favoring those beaks that are better suited at eating the abundant food source in question. Such an
understanding is critical, because it allows contemporary societies to gain a sense of how ongoing atmospheric changes will impact speciation in our day and time. Given the impact that global
warming and climate change is slated to have upon the world in the next several decades or centuries (in the absence of major changes in the worlds consumption of resources
and output of pollutants), it stands to reason that this trend will have a major impact upon speciation as well. In analyzing these trends, the New York Times recently published
an article citing a study which has found that, in the past, species underwent massive changes in size as the result of climate change. In particular, the study cites the
example of Sifrhippus, a tiny mammal from roughly 56 million years ago that resembles the modern horse in most respects other than size; the average sifrhippus was just twelve pounds
(Gorman, 2012). It is not just the small size of sifrhippus that makes it such an example worth studying, however, but rather the changes in size which this species underwent
over a period of several thousand years. By analyzing fossil records in areas such as the Bighorn Basin, where sifrhippus was thought to be abundant in number, scientists have been
able to construct a detailed analysis of changes in size that the species underwent over a 175,000 year period known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures shifted upwards by
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