…can warn us about the future – No matter what one of our candidates says about polar bears, the truth is that global warming is rapidly reducing the number of animal species.And it?s not only happening in Alaska?two species of giraffe, several rhinos and five elephant relatives, along with multitudes of rodents, bush pigs, horses, antelope and apes, once inhabited what is now northern Pakistan. Polar bears are disappearing now, but these other extinctions happened 8 million years ago, when the climate shifted dramatically.Since this happened so long ago, why should we care? Paleoecologist Catherine Badgley says, “Climate is going to produce changes in ecological structure of all sorts of plants and animals around the world, now as in the past. The fossil record can help us understand how much?or how little?climate change is necessary to produce changes in ecosystems.”
Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
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