Looking down to look ahead: How Oregon’s fossil rodents can help us understand the impacts of past and future climate change

Sam Hopkins

University of Oregon

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The ongoing human-mediated changes to climate and habitat are taking us into unknown territory, and there is a real need to understand what we can expect in ecosystem responses. The fossil record provides some important evidence to allow us to forecast ecosystem responses to environmental change, and small mammals in particular offer sensitive barometers of ecological change. Oregon’s rich record of fossil rodents over the last 30 million years gives us an opportunity to understand how these smallest mammalian residents react to the dynamic Oregon landscape, and to guess at how future ecosystem change might drive further faunal change.

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