Paleontologists Unearth Ancient Megafauna in East Africa, How Human and Climate Forecasting Affects Wildlife – Interested in That?
International research involving Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, the University of Cambridge and the National Museum of Kenya aimed to understand how the relationship between wildlife characteristics and the environment in East Africa has changed over time. .
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Jenny McGuire plans to use Late Cenozoic fossils from Africa – about 7.5 million years old – to study long-term relationships between animals, their characteristics, and how they responded to changes in the environment. school. The aim is to use the data to forecast future changes and help inform conservation biological decisions for the continent.
McGuire, an assistant professor with general appointments in School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, and she Laboratory of Space Ecology & Paleontology is collaborating with an international team of researchers for this effort, including scientists from Texas A&M University, Cambridge University and the National Museum of Kenya. Jointly sponsored work by National Science Foundation (US NSF) and National Environmental Research Council (NERC), a division of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), a new body that works with universities, research organisations, businesses, charities and governments.” to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish”.
McGuire said the team hopes to learn more about which functional features of vertebrates (vertebrates) are closely related to factors of displacement at a given site such as temperature, precipitation and other precipitation, and their natural environment – and how those changes have taken place in the environment and how humans have evolved.
“Community-level characterization calculations correlate with specific environmental conditions,” says McGuire. “For example, in places or times with less rain, mammal communities as a whole will have stronger, sturdier, more resilient teeth. And the ratio of ankle gears of mammals living in open habitats to those in closed habitats reflects this, as animals living in more open habitats often need to run faster. “
Africa provides an important natural laboratory for these types of conservation paleontological studies, says McGuire, noting a rich, well-sampled fossil record. The continent is also home to many diverse vertebrate ecosystems, including the most complete natural biome of surviving terrestrial wildlife: megafauna including ” Africa’s great year” – elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos and large bovines such as antelope, antelope and water buffalo.
“Crucially, these megafauna are facing increasing pressure from global economic demand leading to habitat loss, as well as climate change,” said McGuire.
Michelle Lawing, an associate professor at Texas A&M . Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, is the principal investigator of the organization for the project, and McGuire is the principal investigator of the collaborating organization. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, co-principal investigator, is director of Antiquities, Sites and Monuments and a senior research scientist in the Department of Earth Sciences at National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. Jason Head, NERC Principal Investigator, is a professor in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University.
Responding to climate and environmental change
Related research on how communities have evolved over time, and how they are affected by topography, animal migration, and climate change, brought McGuire to Wyoming’s Natural Trap Cave in five of the past seven summers. There, so-called “pits” or sinkhole caves have trapped animals for millennia, leaving behind only their bones and other fossils to tell their stories to McGuire and the researchers. about life there more than 35,000 years ago.
“What we’re really looking at is how communities change across the landscape,” McGuire shared in a blog post. interview about work. “So if we have glaciers moving very far south in North America, how does that drive the distribution of species across the landscape and where they live, and whether Are there new communities or the total number of communities, or if communities are just changing uniformly?
“We are really trying to understand how animals respond to climate change and environmental changes, so that we can better understand how they will respond to increased warming and climate change. is happening today.”
Positive traits for environmental relationships – and negative traits
When it comes to an example of a good trait relationship with the environment involving animals, McGuire cites the role of elephants in Africa – something mastodons also did in North America before their extinction.
“Elephants help maintain savanna habitats,” said McGuire, referring to the giants’ relationship with the grasslands of Africa. “They control the trees along the forest perimeter, preventing them from expanding and taking over savanna habitat.”
Similarly, in ancient North American ecosystems, the loss of mammoths, coupled with climate change, is thought to have led to the loss of the mammoth savanna ecosystem, “a bushland widespread in the Arctic has become extinct as a biome (a McGuire says.
New project’s outreach efforts
The US NSF and UK NERC funding the project also includes student outreach and mentoring to early career scholars. The project’s broader impact goals include measures to support inclusiveness and diversity in science, high-impact training experiences for students and postdoctoral researchers, and adoption of frameworks. Researcher’s model for conservation application and meaningful engagement with the public.
“This international collaborative project will also help train both Kenyan and American (and) European students, thereby establishing another generation of researchers,” said Fredrick Kyalo Manthi.
“We plan to combine tourism and research goals with seminars so that seminar students can directly participate in research and act as co-authors of projects where appropriate,” McGuire adds.
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Expense: NSFDEB-NERC Award # 2124770; NSF CAREER Award # 1945013; International Union of Biological Sciences: Program for Conservation of Paleontology in Africa.
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