It must be a mistake, thought Martin Wikelski. He had been measuring the size of marine iguanas in the Galapagos. After the 1998 El Nino, he wasn't surprised to find that individuals were losing weight. What was hard to believe was that their bodies were becoming shorter, too. But there was no mistake: it turns out that adult iguanas can reverse normal growth by shrinking their skeleton. "It has to be one of the most dramatic documented illustrations of shrinking in response to a change in climate," says Wikelski, now at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.
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