That’s true; Global Warming could make humans shorter. The scientists have claimed to have found evidence that the Global Warming caused the World’s first horses to shrunk, some fifty million years ago. The research teams from Florida and Nebraska have found a link between the Earth heating up and the size of mammals, particularly horses when the world heated up last time.
The scientists used fossils to follow the evolution of horses from their earliest appearance 56 million years ago. As temperature went up their size went down, and vice versa, said Dr. Jonathan Bloch, curator, Florida Museum of Natural History.
Scientists say that the current warming could have the same effect on mammals and could make even humans smaller. “Horses started out small, about the size of the small dog like a miniature schnauzer. What’s surprising is that after they first appeared, they then became even smaller and then dramatically increased in size and that exactly corresponds to the global warming event, followed by cooling.
“It had been known that mammals were small during that time and that it was warm, but we hadn’t understood that temperature specifically was driving the evolution of body size,” Dr Bloch said.
The earliest known horse Sifruhippus appeared during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum period. Studying fossils, researchers traced the evolution of Sifrhippus from a 12-pound animal that shrank during a 130,000 years period to 8.5 pounds – the size of a small house cat – then increased to about 15 pounds during the next 45000 years.