Presenter(s): Eleanor Froehlich—Earth Sciences
Faculty Mentor(s): Samantha Hopkins, Dana Reuter
Session 6: The Earth, Sky & Everything In Between
Camelids, the artiodactyl group including camels, llamas, and alpacas, evolved in North America during the Eocene . The first camelids were smaller than a goat; however, some extinct genera were giraffe sized . Most studies of North American camelids focus on fossils found in the Great Plains and as a result little is known about how camelid diversity responded to climate and vegetation changes in the Pacific Northwest. Horses are a well-studied example of ungulate responses to climactic changes and grassland expansion . They show a general increase in body size that is concurrent with their switch from browsing to mixed feeding and eventually to the grazing we see in modern examples . I suspect that as the environment in the Pacific Northwest dried out, camelids also increased in size due to the grassland expansion . I also believe that camelids incorporated more grasses into their diet . I tested this by documenting camelid diversity in the Pacific Northwest, specifically the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, using the published fossil occurrences on the Paleobiology Database . Body size data was estimated using tooth measurements collected on the Fossilworks database . Camelid species were categorized according to two ecological parameters, body size and diet . I used these to track camelid evolution through time . I found that although body mass does increase there were still small browsing lineages late into the Miocene . This study provides a broader biogeographical picture of how grassland expansion influenced camelid evolution and ecology .