New research reveals changes in relative brain sizes over last 150 million years
New research has demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, relative brain size in mammals is not solely linked to intelligence but is driven by various evolutionary pressures on body size, including adaptations caused by mass extinction and changes in climate.
The international study – the largest of its kind ever carried out – involved a team of 22 scientists, who investigated 1,400 living and extinct mammal species. In the UK, this involved Dr Jacob Dunn and Max Kerney of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) as well as academics based at UCL, the University of Salford, and the Natural History Museum.
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Credit: Javier Lazaro (http://www.lazaroillustration.com/
Scientists from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The international team of 22 scientists, including biologists, evolutionary statisticians, and anthropologists, compared the brain mass of 1400 living and extinct mammals. For the 107 fossils examined among them ancient whales and the oldest Old World monkey skull ever found they used endocranial volume data from skulls instead of brain mass data. The brain measurements were then analyzed along with body size to compare the scale of brain size to body size over deep evolutionary time.
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