The Lilliput effect is a decrease in body size in animal species which have survived a major

extinction Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

. There are several hypotheses as to why these patterns appear in the fossil record, some of which are: the survival of small taxa, dwarfing of larger lineages, and the evolutionary miniaturization from larger ancestral stocks. The term was coined in 1993 by Adam Urbanek in his paper concerning the extinction of

graptoloids Graptolites are a group of colonial animals, members of the subclass Graptolithina within the class Pterobranchia. These filter-feeding organisms are known chiefly from fossils found from the Middle Cambrian (Miaolingian, Wuliuan) through the L ...

and is derived from the island of Lilliput inhabited by a miniature race of people in ''

Gulliver’s Travels ''Gulliver's Travels'', or ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'' is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan S ...

''. This size decrease may just be a temporary phenomenon restricted to the survival period of the extinction event. In 2019 Atkinson et al. coined the term the

Brobdingnag effect Brobdingnag is a fictional land, which is occupied by giants, in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel ''Gulliver's Travels.'' The story's main character, Lemuel Gulliver, visits the land after the ship on which he is travelling is blown off cou ...

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/ref> to describe a related phenomenon operating in the opposite direction, whereby new species evolving after the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction originated at small body sizes before undergoing a size increase. The term is also from Gulliver’s Travels where Brobnignag is a land inhabited by a race of giants.

Significance

Trends in body size changes are seen throughout the fossil record in many organisms, and major changes (shrinking and dwarfing) in body size can significantly affect the morphology of the animal itself as well as how it interacts with the environment. Since Urbanek's publication several researchers have described a decrease in body size in fauna post-extinction event, although not all use the term "Lilliput effect" when discussing this trend in body size decrease. The Lilliput effect has been noted by several authors to have occurred after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event. Early Triassic fauna, both marine and terrestrial, is notably smaller than those preceding and following in the geologic record.

Potential Causes of Smaller Body Sizes

Extinction of Larger Taxa

The extinction event may affect the larger-bodied organisms more severely, leaving smaller bodies taxa behind. As such, the smaller organisms which now make up the population will take time to grow into larger body sizes. These larger animals may be evolutionarily selected against for several reasons, including high energy requirements for which the resources may not longer be available, increased generation times compared to smaller bodied organisms, and smaller population sizes which would be more severely affected by environmental changes.

Development of New Organisms

New animal taxa tend to originally develop at a small size, as hypothesized by S.M. Stanley.

Shrinking of Surviving Taxa

Graph demonstrating a decreasee in body size post extinction event, adapted from Twitchett 2007

It is possible that organisms within a lineage reduced in body size during the extinction event, so that the organisms surviving the event were smaller than their ancestors living before the extinction event occurred.

References

{{Reflist Animal size Evolutionary biology