Fossil mammals resolve regional patterns of Eurasian climate change over 20 million years

Abstract

Fossil teeth of terrestrial plant-eating mammals offer a new, quasi-quantitative proxy for environmental aridity that resolves previously unseen regional features across the Eurasian continent from 24 to 2 million years ago. The pattern seen prior to 11 million years ago are quite different from today’s. Thereafter, a progressively modern rainfall distribution developed at about 7 to 5 million years ago when East Asia remained unexpectedly humid while Europe experienced a transient phase of strong aridity. Mean hypsodonty is a geographically extensive and stratigraphically well-resolved palaeoprecipitation proxy that can be used to constrain the regional details of vegetation and climate models.