Lilliput_effect
The Lilliput effect is an observed decrease in animal body size in genera that have survived a major extinction.[1] There are several hypotheses as to why these patterns appear in the fossil record, some of which are[2]
- simple preferential survival of smaller animals,
- dwarfing of larger lineages, and
- evolutionary miniaturization from larger ancestral stocks.
The term was coined in by Urbanek (1993) in a paper concerning the end-Silurian extinction of graptoloids[3] and is derived from an island in Gulliver’s Travels, Lilliput, inhabited by a race of miniature people. The size decrease may just be a temporary phenomenon restricted to the survival period of the extinction event. Atkinson et al. (2019) coined the term Brobdingnag effect[4] to describe a related phenomenon, operating in the opposite direction, whereby new species evolving after the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction that began the period with small body sizes underwent substantial size increases.[4] The term is also from Gulliver's Travels, where Brobnignag is a place inhabited by a race of giants.