Large animals travel more slowly because they can’t keep cool

Whether an animal is flying, running or swimming, its traveling speed is limited by how effectively it sheds the excess heat generated by its muscles, according to a new study led by Alexander Dyer from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany published April 18th in the open access journal PLOS Biology.

Diego bows to ancestral sabretoothed mammal

Morphological analysis of the discovered specimen’s tooth shapes helped to determine that the specimen was one of the earliest nimravids dating back 37 to 40 million years. Sabertoothed nimravids were early members of Carnivoramorpha, but dogs and cats did not evolve from them. Changes in ecosystems may have driven the evolution and rise of nimravids.