SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Evolving Bigger Bodies Takes Longer Than Getting Small, Study Says
from National Geographic News
Some mammals need roughly 24 million generations to go from mouse-size to elephant-size, a new study says.
Using both fossil and living specimens, scientists calculated growth rates for 28 different mammalian groups during the past 65 million years--and found
that, for mammals, getting big takes longer than shrinking.
It takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for mammals to achieve a hundredfold increase in body size, about 5 million generations for a thousandfold
increase, and about 10 million generations for a 5,000-fold increase, the team discovered.
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