Department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, National Museum of Natural Sciences, CSIC, C/ José Gutiérrez Abascal, 2, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
Evolution. 2010 Aug;64(8):2442-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2010.01009.x.
Between 50,000 and 3,000 years before present (BP) 65% of mammal genera weighing over 44 kg went extinct, together with a lower proportion of small mammals. Why species went extinct in such large numbers is hotly debated. One of the arguments proposes that climate changes underlie Late Quaternary extinctions, but global quantitative evidence for this hypothesis is still lacking. We test the potential role of global climate change on the extinction of mammals during the Late Quaternary. Our results suggest that continents with the highest climate footprint values, in other words, with climate changes of greater magnitudes during the Late Quaternary, witnessed more extinctions than continents with lower climate footprint values, with the exception of South America. Our results are consistent across species with different body masses, reinforcing the view that past climate changes contributed to global extinctions. Our model outputs, the climate change footprint dataset, provide a new research venue to test hypotheses about biodiversity dynamics during the Late Quaternary from the genetic to the species richness level.
在距今 5 万至 3000 年期间，超过 44 公斤的哺乳动物中有 65%灭绝了，同时还有一小部分小型哺乳动物灭绝。为什么有如此多的物种灭绝是一个激烈争论的问题。其中一种观点认为，气候变化是第四纪晚期灭绝的基础，但这一假设的全球定量证据仍然缺乏。我们检验了全球气候变化对第四纪晚期哺乳动物灭绝的潜在作用。我们的结果表明，在第四纪晚期，气候足迹值最高的大陆，换句话说，气候变化幅度较大的大陆，比气候足迹值较低的大陆见证了更多的物种灭绝，南美的情况除外。我们的结果适用于不同体重的物种，这进一步证实了过去的气候变化导致了全球物种灭绝。我们的模型输出，即气候变化足迹数据集，为从遗传学到物种丰富度水平测试第四纪晚期生物多样性动态的假说提供了一个新的研究场所。
