chapter five Macroecological Patterns of Body Size in Mammals across Time and Space

Macroecology is a way of thinking, exploring, and asking questions about complex ecological phenomena. By examining large-scale patterns across temporal, spatial, or taxonomic scales, consistent, com-mon patterns emerge that suggest common underlying causes and pro-cesses. The fi eld is expanding rapidly, and macroecological approaches to biology have led to new insights into the operation of general mech-anistic processes that govern the structure and dynamics of individuals, populations, and complex ecological systems (Smith et al. 2008). Here we are using a macroecological approach to examine patterns in mammalian body size distributions at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Body size is arguably one of the most fundamental attributes of an organism and has long been of interest to scientists. Many physiolog-ical and ecological traits scale with body size (Brown 1995). As a result, information about the body size of an organism can provide considerable information about its ecology and life history. There is enormous varia-tion in the body size of extant organisms, encompassing approximatel