ChicagoMadagascar’s flying foxes shrank sharply from about 1980.
The law classes the fruit bats as vermin, and hunters take them for food on a large scale.
Field Museum scientists measured skulls and teeth of 121 specimens from nine museums spanning 150 years.
The authors suspect commercial hunting, which they believe grew around 1980, drove the shrinking.
How each outlet framed it
- Phys.org leans critical
- attributes the shrinking to commercial hunting and tests it against museum skulls and skins collected decades earlier
Sources: Phys.org