Banishing bias across disciplines, genders and experience - new tool for fairer research metrics miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How mammals evolved big brains
Brain proportions were driven by body size and cataclysmic events.
Scientists have now pieced together a 150-million-year timeline to determine how mammals evolved big brains.
An international team, led by Jeroen Smaers of Stony Brook University, US, compared the brain mass of 1400 living mammals and 107 fossils and compared them to body size to determine how the scale of the two has changed through time.
The result? Brain size and body size didn’t evolve in a stable way.
Instead, the researchers found that big-brained animals like humans, elephants and dolphins all evolved their brain-to-body-size proportions in different ways.
Mammals Brains: New Research Shows Bigger Doesn t Always Mean Smarter gizmodo.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gizmodo.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ancient clues, in the shape of fossils and archaeological evidence of varying quality scattered across Australia, have formed the basis of several hypotheses about the fate of megafauna that vanished about 42,000 years ago from the ancient continent of Sahul, comprising mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and neighbouring islands.
There is a growing consensus that multiple factors were at play, including climate change, the impact of people on the environment, and access to freshwater sources.
Now, research led by Professor Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence of Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) has used sophisticated mathematical modelling to assess how susceptible different species were to extinction – and what it means for the survival of creatures today.
Megafauna extinction mystery - size isn t everything eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.