By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Jenny McGuire, an assistant professor with joint appointments in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, plans to use the late Cenozoic fossil record in Africa — a span of 7.5 million years — to study the long-term relationships between animals, their traits, and how they respond to changes in their environments.
The goal is to use the data to forecast future changes and help inform conservation biology decisions for the continent.
McGuire and her Spatial Ecology & Paleontology Lab are teaming up with an international cohort of researchers for the effort, which includes scientists from Texas A&M University, University of Cambridge, and the National Museums of Kenya.
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The work is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (US NSF) and the National Environment Research Council (NERC), part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), a new body which works in partnership with universities, research organizations, businesses, charities and government “to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish.”
McGuire says the team hopes to learn more about which functional traits vertebrates (animals with backbones) have that closely relate to shifting factors at a given location like temperature, rain and other precipitation, and their natural environment — and how those changes have occurred as environments and humans evolved.
“Community-level trait calculations correlate with specific environmental conditions,” McGuire says. “For example, in places or times when there is less precipitation, mammal communities overall will have more robust, rugged, resistant teeth. And the ankle gear ratios of mammals living in open versus more enclosed habitats reflect this condition, since animals living in more open habitats typically need to run faster.”
McGuire says Africa offers a crucial natural laboratory for these types of conservation paleobiological studies, noting a rich, well-sampled fossil record. The continent is also home to a diverse range of vertebrate ecosystems, including the most complete natural community of remaining terrestrial megafauna: large animals that include the “big five” of Africa — elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines like wildebeests, antelopes, and water buffaloes.
“Critically, these megafauna are facing increasing pressures from global economic demands leading to habitat loss, as well as from changing climates,” McGuire shares.
