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February 23rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda THURSDAY, Feb. 23 (HealthDay News) — Rising global temperatures
appear to have caused the earliest known horse to shrink in size, new
research indicates.
When Sifrhippus first appeared in the forests of North America
more than 50 million years ago, it weighed about 12 pounds.
The horse lived during the 175,000-year period of time called the
Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, during which average global temperatures
rose by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature increase was caused
by the release of huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and
oceans.
During this period of global warming, about one-third of mammal species
experienced significant reductions in size, researchers have found.
Fossilized teeth show that Sifrhippus shrank from about 12
pounds to about 8.5 pounds (a 30 percent reduction) during the first
130,000 years of the time period and then rebounded to about 15 pounds in
the final 45,000 years of that era.
The findings offer new evidence of the cause-and-effect relationship
between temperature and body size, and also offer clues to how animals
might be affected by rising global temperatures in the near future,
according to study leaders Ross Secord of the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln and Jonathan Bloch of the Florida Museum of Natural
History at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
In the study, published in the Feb. 24 issue of the journal
Science, the scientists performed an analysis of the oxygen
isotopes in the fossilized teeth of Sifrhippus.
The results were “absolutely startling,” according to Bloch. “We looked
at the curve and we realized that it was exactly the same pattern that we
were seeing with the horse body size.”
He explained that for the first time, “going back tens of millions of
years — we were able to show that indeed temperature was causing
essentially a one-to-one shift in body size within this lineage of horse.
Because it’s over a long enough time, you can argue very strongly that
what you’re looking at is natural selection and evolution — that it’s
actually corresponding to the shift in temperature and driving the
evolution of these horses,” Bloch said in a University of Nebraska-Lincoln
news release.
Secord added: “This has implications, potentially, for what we might
expect to see over the next century or two, at least with some of the
climate models that are predicting that we will see warming of as much as
4 degrees Centigrade (7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next 100 years.”
Scientists studying birds have already started to notice a possible
decrease in birds’ body size, Secord noted in the news release.
“One of the issues here is that warming [during the Paleocene-Eocene
Thermal Maximum] happened much slower, over 10,000 to 20,000 years to get
10 degrees hotter, whereas now we’re expecting it to happen over a century
or two,” Secord said. “So there’s a big difference in scale and one of the
questions is, ‘Are we going to see the same kind of response?’ Are animals
going to be able to keep up and readjust their body sizes over the next
couple of centuries?”
More information
The Florida Museum of Natural History offers a fossil horse cybermuseum.
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