May 31, 2017
Assistant professor Graham Slater has published a new paper in which he, along with coauthors from Stanford and the Smithsonian, used macroevolutionary modeling to determine that there was an abrupt shift in baleen whale body size evolution that lead to the giants we have today and that it only occurred within the past 4Myr. Our modeling rules out most previous hypotheses for gigantism and instead implies a role for climate driven changes in ocean circulation and productivity that began in the late Pliocene. This work was covered in the NYTimes, the BBC, the LATimes, The Guardian, PBS Newshour, and Science. He also was interviewed on Canadian and German radio. Congratulations Graham!