ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Herbivore teeth predict climatic limits in Kenyan ecosystems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Lower speciation, not higher extinction, drove African megaherbivore diversity collapse.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Two major ecological shifts shaped 60 million years of ungulate faunal evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The emergence of modern zoogeographic regions in Asia examined through climate-dental trait association patterns.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Eco-ISEA3H, a machine learning ready spatial database for ecometric and species distribution modeling.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Comparison of environmental inference approaches for ecometric analyses: Using hypsodonty to estimate precipitation.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- A tip of the hat to evolutionary change.Nature · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A major focus in evolutionary biology is to understand how the evolution of organisms relates to changes in their physical environment. In the terrestrial realm, the interrelationships among climate, vegetation, and herbivores lie at the heart of this question. Here we introduce and test a scoring scheme for functional traits present on the worn surfaces of large mammalian herbivore teeth to capture their relationship to environmental conditions. We modeled local precipitation, temperature, primary productivity, and vegetation index as functions of dental traits of large mammal species in 13 national parks in Kenya over the past 60 y. We found that these dental traits can accurately estimate local climate and environment, even at small spatial scales within areas of relatively uniform climate (within two ecoregions), and that they predict limiting conditions better than average conditions. These findings demonstrate that the evolution of key functional properties of organisms may be more reflective of demands during recurring adverse episodes than under average conditions or during isolated severe events.
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