Here’s one way to react to a warming planet: get smaller. We know mammals literally shrank, during a massive global warming event 56 million years ago. Imagine an early horse ancestor the size of a cat. Now back then, the earth was 46 degrees hotter on average than it is right now. So researchers wanted to know: do mammals still experience shrinking - a.k.a. dwarfing - during other, less intense periods of warming? Abigail D'Ambrosia is a researcher at the University of New Hampshire, and she