Paper 21 by K. Sullivan

Paper 21

Graham R.W. 1986. Response of mammalian communities to environmental changes during the late Quaternary. Pages 300-313 in J. Diamond and T.J. Case, eds., Community Ecology. Harper and Rowe, New York.

Blog by Kaitlyn Sullivan

Paper Author: Russell W. Graham

(Commentary by Kathleen Lyons)

Russell W. Graham

·       Professor for the Department of Geosciences, Penn State University

·       Museum Director, Penn State University

·       Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1976

Research Interests

·       Vertebrate Paleontology

·       Quaternary Vertebrate Paleoecology

·       Taphonomy

·       Neotoma Paleoecological Database

http://www.geosc.psu.edu/academic-faculty/graham-russell

Kathleen Lyons

• Ph.D. University of Chicago
• M.S. University of Chicago
• M.S. Texas Tech University
• B.S. Wayland Baptist University

Currently, Kathleen S. Lyons is an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Nebraska.  “I am interested in the factors affecting and controlling species diversity at multiple scales across both space and time. Moreover, I am particularly interested in the effects of global climate change on species diversity and use the fossil record of mammals to evaluate how current changes in global climate may affect diversity patterns in the future. Because it provides a useful way to compare modern species and communities to fossil species and communities, I focus on the similarities and differences in macroecological patterns across space and time.”

http://biosci.unl.edu/kate-lyons

Summary

                  For a long time, ecologists generally believed that communities were made up of interacting sets of the same species for a long time.  However, Graham argued that this is a flawed theory and the species within a community likely changed over time rather than remaining static.  To test this, Graham utilized the fossil record using fossils of small mammals from the late Pleistocene and Holocene.  By doing so, he determined that small mammals even had “long distance range shifts during the last glaciation cycle.”  His data provided a medium to show that communities have changed, leading to new combinations of species with ranges that do not overlap today.