Say you're a goat stuck on a Mediterranean island with scarce food and no way to leave. How do you survive? The strange species Myotragus answered that question by getting small, and, most unusually, adopting the cold-bloodedness normally seen in reptiles. In a paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say that the now-extinct dwarf goat managed to survive thousands of years of resource scarcity by adjusting its metabolism to match how much food was available.
The discovery marks the first time scientists have seen this cold-blooded survival strategy in mammals. The surprising skill likely allowed the goats to endure potentially fatal periods of scarcity on what is now the Spanish island of Majorca [National Geographic News]
. Paleontologists figured out this oddball habit of Myotragus by analyzing its bones, as well as those of reptiles that lived in the same time and place.
The ...
