Paleobiology

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The importance of soft-bodied organisms in ancient food webs

Past extinction events are key to understanding how modern life will respond to climate change. For ecologists who study communities of interacting organisms, the fossil record holds a wealth of information about how different species react to environmental perturbations, but with a major drawback — it only captures species with bones and shells.

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Climate change helped kill off super-sized Ice Age animals in Australia

A new study in Paleobiology has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction.

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