Researchers determined how habitable regions for 10 modern bird families restricted to tropical regions have changed over the last 56 million years by combining paleoclimate reconstructions and ecological niche models with the birds' Cenozoic fossil records, and found that many tropical birds would have formerly been suited to life in high-latitude areas; the results suggest that cooling trends throughout time have determined the geographic distributions of many bird groups, and rapid climatic changes may prompt extinction and distributional changes in the future.
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Article #19-03866: "Climatic shifts drove major contractions in avian latitudinal distributions throughout the Cenozoic," by Erin E. Saupe et al.
MEDIA CONTACT: Daniel J. Field, University of Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM; tel: +44-7413231913; email: < djf70@cam.ac.uk >; Erin E. Saupe, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM, email: < erin.saupe@earth.ox.ac.uk >
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences