Jacob co-led an international team to compile data on the locations, local climate records, and body sizes of thousands of bird and mammal species along with fossil data on their extinct ancestors – the Mesozoic dinosaurs and mammals.
The findings of the project, titled Global latitudinal gradients and the evolution of body size in dinosaurs and mammals, contradict a very long standing evolutionary ‘law’: that warm-blooded animals living in colder environments (usually higher latitudes) tend to be larger than those in warmer environments near the equator, e.g. polar bears in the Arctic are larger than Southeast Asian sun bears. In this sense, the results overturn a textbook idea in ecology about climate’s role in the evolution of species.
The output has, unsurprisingly, received significant media attention and Jacob gave interviews for BBC News and Radio. This output is a very worthy Environment Theme winner (amongst stiff competition) because it will likely have substantial impact in macroecology and evolutionary biology and also demonstrates good outreach of science.
Dr Jacob Gardner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading.