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Jeremy C. Rehm, Digest: Climate effects on chipmunk cranial morphology, Evolution, Volume 71, Issue 3, 1 March 2017, Pages 806–807, https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13185
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The threat of rapid climate change raises questions not only about species’ survival and global biodiversity, but also about how climate impacts morphological evolution. Many studies have sought answers by studying climatic shifts in geologic history, and they have produced mixed results. Renaud et al. (2005), for example, showed how the drying and cooling climate between the late Miocene and Pliocene promoted the dental evolution of two genera of rodents, one a diet generalist and the other a specialist, from the same phylogenetic lineage. In contrast, both Alroy et al. (2000) and Faith and Behrensmeyer (2013) found little evidence that climate fluctuations directly promoted mammalian evolution.
Although sourcing changes in global climate from the past may most realistically reflect the threat to species today, an alternative method could investigate extant organisms inhabiting diverse climatic niches, such as chipmunks (genus Tamias).
Chipmunks arose 30 million years after their earliest squirrel ancestor that lived during the Oligocene (Thorington and Ferrell, 2006) but remained wanting of diversity until around three million years ago, when they rapidly radiated (Reid et al. 2012). Today, 23 chipmunk species (of 25 in the world) live in western North America, inhabiting climates from temperate rainforests to arid deserts, from warm ocean coasts to frigid mountain peaks.
