Herbivore teeth predict climatic limits in Kenyan ecosystems.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Zliobaite I
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5111722 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Herbivore teeth predict climatic limits in Kenyan ecosystems.
Žliobaitė Indrė I Rinne Janne J Tóth Anikó B AB Mechenich Michael M Liu Liping L Behrensmeyer Anna K AK Fortelius Mikael M
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20161024 45
A major focus in evolutionary biology is to understand how the evolution of organisms relates to changes in their physical environment. In the terrestrial realm, the interrelationships among climate, vegetation, and herbivores lie at the heart of this question. Here we introduce and test a scoring scheme for functional traits present on the worn surfaces of large mammalian herbivore teeth to capture their relationship to environmental conditions. We modeled local precipitation, temperature, prim ...[more]
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