GAINESVILLE, Fla., Feb. 12 (UPI) -- U.S. paleontologists have documented the largest climate change in central North America since the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
The University of Florida researchers say a temperature drop of nearly 15 degrees Fahrenheit is documented within the fossilized teeth of horses and other plant-eating mammals.
The overwhelming majority of previous climate-change studies on the 400,000-year transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene epochs, about 33.5 million years ago, focus on marine environments. But University of Florida vertebrate paleontologist Bruce MacFadden and colleagues determine the shift in fossils obtained from the Great Plains.
"If a temperature change of this magnitude occurred today, Florida would have weather similar to Washington, D.C., or even farther north," said MacFadden, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
The study appears online and in the print edition of the journal Nature.
