ArticleScientific reports2022
Small brains predisposed Late Quaternary mammals to extinction.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Predictors of extinction risk in large tropical forest mammals: From global to local.Science advances · 2026Article
- Evolutionary stasis in synapsid encephalization during the end-permian mass extinction.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Global Patterns of Niche Changes in Alien Mammals: Potential Drivers and Significance for Invasion Projections.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Macroevolutionary brain scaling is a microevolutionary metaphenomenon.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- EutherianCoP. An integrated biotic and climate database for conservation paleobiology based on eutherian mammals.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Co-evolutionary dynamics of mammalian brain and body size.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Evolutionary ecomorphology for the twenty-first century: examples from mammalian carnivores.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Domestication effect of reduced brain size is reverted when mink become feral.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Late Quaternary witnessed a dramatic wave of large mammal extinctions, that are usually attributed to either human hunting or climatic change. We hypothesized that the large mammals that survived the extinctions might have been endowed with larger brain sizes than their relatives, which could have conferred enhanced behavioral plasticity and the ability to cope with the rapidly changing Late Quaternary environmental conditions. We assembled data on brain sizes of 291 extant mammal species plus 50 more that went extinct during the Late Quaternary. Using logistic, and mixed effect models, and controlling for phylogeny and body mass, we found that large brains were associated with higher probability to survive the Late Quaternary extinctions, and that extant species have brains that are, on average, 53% larger when accounting for order as a random effect, and 83% when fitting a single regression line. Moreover, we found that models that used brain size in addition to body size predicted extinction status better than models that used only body size. We propose that possessing a large brain was an important, yet so far neglected characteristic of surviving megafauna species.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.