Peering into the past to identify the species most at risk from climate change

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https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj5763

By Erin Saupe, Cooper Malanoski, et al, Science. 

Excerpt: A polar bear floating on a tiny piece of sea ice has become the iconic image of the extinction risks of climate change. But not all threats to species from our warming planet are so easy to see. That’s why paleobiologist Erin Saupe, Ph.D. student Cooper Malanoski, and their colleagues turned to the fossil record. By understanding which species fell victim to climactic fluctuations in the past, they aimed to get a better sense of which organisms might be most vulnerable now. “Despite the threat that climate change poses to biodiversity, we do not yet fully understand how it causes animals to go extinct,” Saupe and Malanoski explain in an article for The Conversation. So, the team examined data from nearly 300,000 marine invertebrate fossils from the last 485 million years, using statistics to examine how traits of the animals and their environment link to their likelihood of extinction. “Alarmingly, our research has, for the first time, identified climate change as a significant predictor of extinction,” the pair write. Species that experienced local climate changes of 7°C or greater were more likely to perish, regardless of any specific traits, they report in the most recent issue of Science. [Climate change is an important predictor of extinction risk on macroevolutionary timescales] ...The best predictor of extinction was a small geographic range, but smaller bodies and a narrow temperature tolerance added to a species’ odds of dying out. 

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