We ’re used to mice being small and elephants being big , but there ’s no reason they will stay that way forever . elephant could become pipsqueaks and mice could get mammoth … and one of those will pass much faster than the other .
Alistair Evans of Australia ’s Monash University tack a squad of twenty life scientist and paleontologists with one finish : to figure out how the size of specie evolve over meg of year . The fossil record shows us how all sorts of dissimilar mammals exploded in size of it after the dinosaurs went extinct , and we can use that grounds to figure out how tight these to begin with pint - sized mammals turned into megafauna .
They rule that mice really could evolve to be the size of elephants – it ’s just get going to take them 24 million generations to do it . Considering mice start breeding at approximately six weeks and elephant get copulate around the age of 20 , that imply it should taken anywhere from 2.8 to 480 million class to produce elephant - sized mouse … assuming you protrude decently now , of course of study .
According to the researcher , it ’s a bit easier to get larger animals to elephant size . rabbit , for instance , would only need about 5 to 10 million generation , while sheep could get there in a downright speedy 1.6 million generations . To really speed up the growth procedure , you ’re going to need to originate throwing animals into water ( note : you probably should n’t really do this ) , as marine mammals like heavyweight increase in size at twice the rate of their commonwealth similitude . Co - author Dr. Erich Fitzgerald suggests that ’s because the water help sustain a passel of weight , take into account for the evolution of much larger species in a much shorter infinite of time .
While it takes a long clock time for species to get bigger , they can get small again in no clip at all . Normal elephant have evolved into dwarf elephant mintage in just 100,000 contemporaries . This was principally a result of what ’s known as island dwarfing , in which a population gets cut off from the mainland . This isolation gives species an evolutionary bonus to squander less solid food and regurgitate faster , both of which are action by becoming smaller . We ’ve see examples of this is mammoths , Hippo , and , yes , hominids .
https://gizmodo.com/tooth-of-ancient-hobbit-people-could-reveal-their-mys-5726367
All this leaves me with one lingering philosophic conundrum — if mice did evolve into the sizing of elephant , would they be frightened of themselves ? I guess I ’ll have an reply for you all in 24 million generations .
ViaPNAS . Image by teclasorg onFlickr .
BiologyElephantEvolutionMammalScience
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