By studying the wood-cutting behaviour of ancient beavers that once roamed the Canadian high Arctic, an international team of scientists has discovered that tree predation – feeding on trees and harvesting wood – evolved in these now-extinct rodents long before dam-building.
This is an important discovery as woodcutting is a key behaviour for modern-day beavers’ capacity to modify, create and maintain habitats.
This new research suggests that tree predation has existed for more than 20 million years, enough time that might have allowed beavers to affect the evolution of certain trees species.
The ancient beavers, belonging to the fossil lineage Dipoides, lived four million years ago and were approximately two-thirds the size of today’s Canadian beavers. They gnawed trees with rounded front teeth, not squared teeth like their modern relatives, and researchers believe this woodcutting behaviour originated for harvesting food, not from a compulsion for building dams
Continue reading at Western University.
Image via Luke Dickey.