Abstract
Body mass is a fundamental ecological parameter of mammals with implications for a variety of other ecological characteristics. While it cannot be directly measured in fossil taxa, it can be inferred using allometric relationships between skeletal dimensions and mass derived from extant species. Many such relationships have been described, primarily for dental and limb dimensions. Methods of statistical analysis vary widely, however, in ways with substantial implications for the inferred masses of fossil species. The subset of extant species from which the relationship is derived must be representative of the evolutionary and ecological scope of the fossil taxa for which mass is to be estimated. Increasing computing power and an explosion of phylogenetic comparative methods offer the opportunity to gain an understanding of the processes driving these important empirical relationships.
Keywords
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Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Darin Croft, Scott Simpson and Denise Su for organizing the mammal paleoecology symposium that led to this volume, inspiring numerous exciting and productive conversations. I also owe thanks to Samantha Price for endless patience in teaching me phylogenetic comparative methods. Thanks to undergraduate and graduate students past and present for questioning assumptions, inspiring research, and actually getting science done. In particular, I will be ever grateful to John Orcutt for deep discussions of body size evolution in the course of his dissertation research. Finally, thanks to Edward Davis for years of discussion of body mass reconstruction, statistics of fossil samples, and regression analysis.
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Hopkins, S.S.B. (2018). Estimation of Body Size in Fossil Mammals. In: Croft, D., Su, D., Simpson, S. (eds) Methods in Paleoecology. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94265-0_2
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