“Today, the beaver has a profound impact on the landscape and is known to increase the biodiversity of the local ecosystem through tree-harvesting and dam building. It’s fascinating to look back in time and figure out how this hyper-specialized tool-kit of behaviours came to be,” said Western alumni Tessa Plint.
Plint has been studying the wood cutting behaviour of ancient beavers who inhabited the Canadian high arctic. Plint and a group of international scientists have discovered that feeding on trees and harvesting wood (known as tree predation) is something that evolved in beavers 20 million years before they started building dams.
Woodcutting is a key behavior in how today’s beavers modify, create, and maintain habitats. Ancient beavers were approximately two thirds the size of the Canadian Beaver and lived four million years ago.
“Ancient animals and ecosystems that thrived in the high Arctic during warmer times in geological history show us a glimpse of what this biome could look like in the future under the effects of global warming in polar regions,” Said Plint
Researchers at Westerns Laboratory for Stable Isotope Science examined chemical signatures preserved in ancient beaver bones to find out that they ate trees.
