Hippo-like Mammals Once Basked in Toasty Arctic

Hiya! Trust you’re in fine fettle today! Help yourself to a mug of coffee and a virtual treat. Boy, this must have been a different world way back when, huh? I mean, they’re saying that cold-blooded alligators and giant tortoises once thrived well above the Arctic Circle. 

It turns out the climate in some Arctic locales sometimes never dipped below freezing some 50 million years ago, scientists now reveal. 

These new findings could foreshadow the impacts of continuing global warming on arctic plants and animals,

Scientists investigated Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic, which nowadays is one of the coldest, driest environments on Earth, where sparse vegetation and a few mammals eke out life amid tundra, permafrost and ice sheets. Temperatures on the island, which is adjacent to Greenland, range from roughly minus 37 degrees F in winter (minus 38 Celsius) to 48 degrees F (nearly 9 degrees C) in summer.

However, during the early Eocene period about 50 million years ago, Ellesmere Island was probably similar to swampy cypress forests in the southeastern United States today. Fossils collected there in recent decades by various teams revealed a lush landscape, which hosted giant tortoises, aquatic turtles, alligators, large snakes, flying lemurs, tapirs and hippo-like and rhino-like mammals. 

Animal teeth hold climate clues

 

To see what temperatures might have been like back then, Eberle and her colleagues analyzed oxygen isotopes in fossil bones and teeth of mammals, fish and turtles from the island. (Isotopes are atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons.) 

These animals included a large, hippo-like mammal known as Coryphodon, as well as bowfin fish with long dorsal fins and powerful jaws and aquatic turtles from the Emydidae family, the largest and most diverse family of pond turtles.

"By looking at a host of animals with different physiologies, we were better able to pin down warm- and cold-month temperatures," Eberle added. 

The team concluded the average temperatures of the warmest month on Ellesmere Island during the early Eocene were from 66 to 68 degrees F (19 to 20 degrees C), while the coldest-month temperature was about 32 to 38 degrees F (0 to 3.5 degrees C). 

“Waiter… bring me some turtle soup and make it snappy!”

      

See ya!

Bob

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