July 26, 2024
Mapping Mammalian Biodiversity
Mapping Mammalian Biodiversity
Emeritus Curator Bruce Patterson and Assistant Curator Anderson Feijó have published a new article entitled “Mammalian Biodiversity” in the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology.
Their article updates and extends a 2016 treatment of this topic by Bruce with a novel analysis of species discovery in the 21st century by Anderson. No other group of animals exhibits a comparable range of body sizes (over eight orders of magnitude, from ~2 gram bats and shrews to 200-ton whales), or occupies such a wide range of habitats (from deep-sea abysses to 22,000 foot mountains). Incredibly, 12% of all known mammal species have been discovered in the 21st century (see map) many described at Field Museum—notably, South America, Africa, Madagascar, and the Philippines.
July 26. 2024
