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Published online 1 July 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.927
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Condemned to single-sex life by climate change
All tuatara could be born male — and thus doomed to extinction — within decades.
Rising temperatures look set to produce male-only offspring in the tuatara, condemning the ancient reptile species to extinction by 2085, computer modelling predicts.
Researchers studying tuatara (Sphenodon spp.
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Interesting stuff! As part of a general review into sex determining mechanisms, we published a model for dinosaur extinction that predicted the same thing. See Miller, Summers and Silber, Fertility and Sterility, 81, 2004. Essentially, the model indicated that a slip into a male biased sex ratio distortion would lead to extinction in a relatively short time period although a rise in temp could also lead to a female surplus, which wouldn't be so serious (in the short term).
Well of course this makes sense. It would have happened earlier, but we've never seen the earth ever nearly as warm as it is right now. Those stories of mining and growing grains in Iceland by the Vikings coming across the ocean to America are just fakes. And the proof in the tools and equipment found under glaciers in Iceland are just complicated hoaxes (I blame people making false glaciers to set this up). That or maybe a couple hundred years ago this would already have happened; and the fact that we still have tuatara makes this a questionable assumption. Of course, before we can find out, it will have to actually start getting warmer again. Which from recent studies may take a decade or more. "they face a rate of temperature change that is unprecedented over the last 50 million years" Would that be the 1 year drop that wiped out 70 years of warming we just had? Or are you talking about the 70 years of warming as extreme, and the one year drop wiping all that out as a non-event? I love the certainty. Knowing for sure that this is obviously absolutely outside the "50 million year" range is just amazing. Does anyone have incontrovertible proof of the average temperature of the earth 38,283,193 years ago? Or do they have guesses that are currently contradictory to other guesses based on other scientists using other methods/theories? Naah, he wouldn't state this as fact if he didn't know 100% for sure. Otherwise this would be more junk science posing as real science.