Dr. Emilie C. Snell-Rood Summary

The author supports the idea that animals' brains are changing in response to human-dominated environments very well because he/she gives many pieces of relevant evidence from credible sources showing the huge relationship between humans and city-dwelling animals. The author gives the example of Dr. Emilie C. Snell-Rood, a biologist who works at the University of Minnesota, and her experiment with a species' brains. "In a new study, a University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, offers evidence suggesting that we may be driving evolution in a more surprising way." This quote shows that Dr. Snell-Rood is from the University of Minnesota, which is a professional place of studying. Therefore, Dr. Snell-Rood is a professional in studying
She selected dozens of individual skulls that were collected as far back as a century ago." This quote shows that Dr. Snell-Rood, who is a professional biologist, uses ten different species to do her research; it is good evidence because it strongly supports that idea that animals' brains have changed over a century. "Two important results emerged from their research. In two species — the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole — the brains of animals from cities or suburbs were about 6 percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or other rural areas... Dr. Snell-Rood and Ms. Wick also found that in rural parts of Minnesota, two species of shrews and two species of bats experienced an increase in brain size as well." This quote shows six different species of animals that experienced a brain-change in the city members of an animal: the white-footed mouse, the meadow vole, two species of bats, and two species of shrews. That is six animals out of the ten that Dr. Snell-Rood experimented with. Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden were studying guppies with bigger brains. "Studies by other scientists have linked better learning in animals with bigger