Move over, Leo. Give me more elbow room
By Sid Perkins
The average size of the largest modern-day land animals on each of 25 oceanic islands and five continents strongly depends on the land area there, a new study shows. The formula holds across diverse animals and habitats, from the iguanas and owls that live on wave-washed outcrops in the Galpagos Islands to the lions and elephants that populate the plains of Africa.
The research looked at the largest carnivores and herbivores found in each of the areas during the past 65,000 years. That restricts the analysis to the period for which there’s a fairly complete fossil record, says Jared Diamond, an evolutionary biologist at University of California, Los Angeles. It also enables the researchers to consider large animals that went extinct only recently, including mammoths and lions in North America, saber-toothed tigers in South America, and elephant birds on Madagascar.