One of the most shrill arguments from alarmists is the idea that climate change will wipe out species because they can’t adapt. The claims run from polar bears to tortoises, to plants and coral. Yes, if we listen to these arguments, Nature so poorly equipped it’s creatures that they can’t adapt to a slightly warmer future.
Except when the last ice age ended, and it got warmer, and the saber-toothed cats got bigger because the prey got bigger…instead of disappearing due to “climate change”.
From the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
La Brea Tar Pit fossil research shows climate change drove evolution of Ice Age predators
LOS ANGELES — Concerns about climate change and its impact on the world around us are growing daily. New scientific studies at the La Brea Tar Pits are probing the link between climate warming and the evolution of Ice Age predators, attempting to predict how animals will respond to climate change today.
The La Brea Tar Pits are famous for the amazing array of Ice Age fossils found there, such as ground sloths, mammoths, and predators like saber-toothed cats and powerful dire wolves. But the climate during the end of the Ice Age (50,000-11,000 years ago) was unstable, with rapid warming and cooling. New research reported here has documented the impact of this climate change on La Brea predators for the first time.
Two new studies published by research associates at of the Page Museum document significant change over time in the skulls of both dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. “Different tar pits at La Brea accumulated at different times,” said F. Robin O’Keefe of Marshall University, lead author on the dire wolf study (Palaeontologia Electronica, April 9, 2014). “When we compare fossils deposited at different times, we see big changes. We can actually watch evolution happening.”
After the end of the last Ice Age, La Brea dire wolves became smaller and more graceful, adapting to take smaller prey as glaciers receded and climate warmed. This rapidly changing climate drove change in saber-toothed cats as well. “Saber-toothed cats show a clear correlation between climate and shape. Cats living after the end of the Ice Age are larger, and adapted to taking larger prey,” said Julie Meachen of Des Moines University, lead author on the sabertooth study (Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 2014).
The two scientists discuss their work in a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK_DKSNbgR4&feature=youtu.be
“We can see animals adapting to a warming climate at La Brea,” said O’Keefe. “Then humans show up and all the big ones disappear. We haven’t been able to establish causality there yet. But we are working on it.”
The emerging links between climate change and evolution needs further study. There are many unanswered questions; such as why predators change in the ways that they do, the importance of factors other than climate, and whether the arrival of humans played a role in the mass extinction at the end of the Ice Age. “There is much work to be done on the specimens from the tar pits. We are working actively to bring together the researchers and resources needed to expand on these discoveries,” says John Harris, chief curator at the Page Museum. “Climate change is a pressing issue for all of us, and we must take advantage of what Rancho La Brea can teach us about how ecosystems react to it.”
O’Keefe, F. R., W. J. Binder, S. R. Frost, R. W. Sadleir, and B. Van Valkenburgh. 2014. Cranial morphometrics of the dire wolf, Canis dirus, at Rancho La Brea: temporal variability and its links to nutrient stress and climate. Palaeontologia Electronica.
Palaeontologia Electronica was the first peer-reviewed online paleontology journal in the world and has been in publication for 17 years. On April 9, visit palaeo-electronica.org/content/2014/723-canis-dirus-craniometrics
Meachen, J. A., F. R. O’Keefe, and R. W. Sadleir. 2014. Evolution in the sabre-tooth cat, Smilodon fatalis, in response to Pleistocene climate change. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 27: 714-723. Visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12340/abstract
About the Natural History Family of Museums
The Natural History Family of Museums includes the NHM, the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits (Hancock Park/Mid-Wilshire), and the William S. Hart Park and Museum (Newhall, California). The Family of Museums serves more than one million families and visitors annually, and is a national leader in research, exhibitions and education.
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Darn those open pit fires our ancestors used, they created the first Global Warming problem and now we have no one to tax!
/Sarc
It’s just grant grovelling. Grovel for some research budget by adding on climate change to the proposal.
Those pesky Mastodons were driving their SUV’s up and down Rodeo Drive, I tell ya!
Pray tell me something new.
Kindest Regards
Who put those pits in the middle of LA anyway?
“Then humans show up and all the big ones disappear. We haven’t been able to establish causality there yet. But we are working on it.”
____________________________
The answer is obvious. Get your grant application(s) turned in and approved and then crank up the models. You will then be able to clearly show that we are to blame and must be suppressed. Especially since this all happened in North America and North Americans are the worst of all and must be made to pay and pay.
You know, with all that oil and tar on the surface you’d think there would have to be a huge amount of oil under the surface just waiting to be produced. Oh, I know there was some drilling back in the 30’s and 40’s, but modern experience in Texas and other places shows that the best place to find new oil fields is to go deeper and deeper underneath oil oil fields – that’s why the fracking boom is happening in all the spots that have had shallow oil wells for 50 years.
A shame that’s no longer allowed in California. Imagine what it would do to the state budget to have those extra billions of dollars coming in. Oh, well.
WSS — they’d have to have a steady supply of liquid gold come out of that spot. Pretty pricy real estate. I recall it’s near Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive, etc?
Perhaps the dire wolves became smaller because the larger-and-larger saber-tooth tigers ate the bigger ones.
Nah.
a jones says:
April 10, 2014 at 8:08 am
Pray tell me something new.
Kindest Regards
____________________
In this case, prey tell me something new.
“Then humans show up and all the big ones disappear. We haven’t been able to establish causality there yet. But we are working on it.”
There can be only one! BMOP(lanet) that is.
Must have been the Roch Brothers’ fault.
Yabba-dabba-do!
wws says:
April 10, 2014 at 8:23 am
You know, with all that oil and tar on the surface you’d think there would have to be a huge amount of oil under the surface just waiting to be produced.
The geologists know the oil is there; it is just a question of the economics of recovering it.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-monterey-shale-20140407,0,4025367,full.story#axzz2yUweWz2k
…wolves became smaller and more graceful..
As a wild guess, someone probably means “smaller and more gracile..”.
Same word root, but a more technical meaning for body form…
It would be interesting to know how many samples they took, whether they were from several examples, was it typical that all the wolves appear smaller & all the sabre-tooth-tigers were bigger. Are there any associated dating issues if bone has been encased in oil & tar? As to humans turning up, & big s-t-ts & large wolves disappearing, I am sure he meant to say it was all those white western European swine who caused it to happen in the 17th, 18th, 19th, & early 20th Centuries, that caused it. It wouldn’t be those Native Americans who did it! Would it?
I think fracking under Los Angeles, and most of California, is a totally different story than fracking in Colorado or Wyoming. LA is riddled with hundreds of faults, and the rest of California is not much better. There would be some risk of earthquakes fracking there.
Adaptation is NOT evolution. Darwin’s cult is species metamorphosis and life from dead matter. Period. A cat becoming ‘bigger’ is not proof of anything, except that it is still a cat that has built muscle, imbibed nutrients, enzymes and meat; and whose DNA software code is still that of a cat. A body builder is human proof of the same. Another hilarious by-line from a non-scientific cult closely allied with the cult of warming…..cats ‘evolved’ due to climate change. Good Grief.
What’s so weird about all this is that we have a historical record showing all those species alive
and well during the previous warm periods, periods far warmer than today or the warmth likely at the end of this century. Polar bears didn’t just happen yesterday – they were around when the Arctic was ice-free , so why does anyone think an ice-free Arctic sea is going to kill them off this time around?
The part which caught my attention:
“the importance of factors other than climate”
It almost sounds as if they started out with the premise “We know climate was changing, so lets see what changes we can find in the fauna record.” Then they describe their results with “climate change” being front and center.
I can understand using the climate change aspect to solicit grant funding. It’s the world they have to live in. It might be picking nits, but I believe they could have been a bit more circumspect in how they presented their results.
Warming causes smaller prey, which causes smaller predators.
Warming causes larger prey, which causes larger predators.
No matter what, no matter when, no matter the contradiction … WARMING DID IT.
Warming is *magical*…
Is anyone surprised at this? You can’t get any closter to big oil than the La Brea Tar Pits.
(sarc)
Rancho La Brea tar pits lie above the Salt Lake oil field, produced since (?)
Visit the Page Museum website, very interesting exibits.
http://www.tarpits.org/la-brea-tar-pits
Better yet, go to the Museum!
Everyone knows that the same effect can be seen in the remains of Piltdown man.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Let’s see what they actually say for Smilodon fatalis:
Pit 77 (37 KY BP) small morph
Pit 91 (28 KA BP) large morph
Pit 2051 (26 KY BP) small morph
Pit 13 (17.7 KA BP) intermediate morph
Pit 61-67 (13,6 KY BP) large morph
Hardly a very coherent trend. Also note that the three latest dates includes the glacial maximum c. 20 KA BP, so the “intermediate” Smilodons at 17.7 KA BP were living in a considerably colder climate than the “small” ones at 26 KA BP.
Also I fail to understand how they can date the Smilodons in each pit so exactly. The pits were mostly active for a long time, so unless they actually radiocarbon dated each separate bone the ages are quite doubtful. In Pit 13 all three dated Smilodon bones are admittedly of very similar age (14,950-15360 uncalibrated BP), and also in Pit 61-67 11,130-12,200 uncalibrated (13,025-14,304 calibrated) BP (Alleröd, by the way, not Bölling), but in the other pits the spreads are much larger: Pit 77 28,200-33,100 uncalibrated BP, Pit 91 25,100-30,800 uncalibrated BP, Pit 2051 20,900-29,760 uncalibrated BP. Note that the ages from pits 77, 91 and 2051 all overlap.
I’ve seen a couple of similar papers lately, written by biologists without any geological experience who “find” dramatic effects from climate changes by blind faith in radiocarbon dates and undisturbed stratigraphies.
Details on radiocarbon dates from La Brea here: http://www.nhm.org/site/sites/default/files/pdf/contrib_science/CS518.pdf
Adaptation is NOT evolution. Darwin’s cult is species metamorphosis and life from dead matter. Period. A cat becoming ‘bigger’ is not proof of anything, except that it is still a cat that has built muscle, imbibed nutrients, enzymes and meat; and whose DNA software code is still that of a cat.
It seems that there is much you have failed to understand.
@lb, This is not grant grovelling. FR O’Keefe has been doing this sort of research since day one of his Ph.d. and in any area of science where field work is required needs some grants. The fact that this research points to evidence counter to the alarmist claims most of us should be happy to be seeing.
The general desire to slam grants for academic research may be tempting but misplaced. A lot of good has come out of such grants. These authors did not plug made up data into a model and crank anything out, but took measurements and came to a conclusion that seems very reasonable: llfe is very adaptable.
The general desire to slam grants for academic research may be tempting but misplaced. A lot of good has come out of such grants.
==========
It’s grant grovelling. If I was doing research, I’d do the same. A least it means some of the climate research cash hasn’t been going into crap research.