Prediction of offspring in extant and extinct mammals: relevance and use of the study

ELISSAMBURU ANDREA

San Juan

Congreso; XXIX Jornadas Argentinas Mastozoología; 2016

Recent possibility of estimating offspring body mass, litter weight, and litter size in fossil mammals gives a new approximation to study the history of life, paleoecology, and evolution of fossil species. Ecological aspects as developmental and maturity time, can be derived from offspring estimations and combined for studying population growth, faunal interaction and evolution in fossil taxa. Additionally, accessing to fossil offspring traits opens a new focus of research in which these variables can be used to generate interpretation tools to understand speciation, extinction, geographic distribution, evolution of biological traits, as competence and predation pressure of fossil mammal species. Prediction of offspring in extant and fossil mammals is presented, relevance of the issue for improving paleoecology and evolution studies is developed, and several tools and study approximations are proposed to start the research development and to boost thoughts in this important theme.