Statistics

Mammal Body Size 4

This is a follow up to Mammal Body Size 2 and Mammal Body Size 3.

We have previously compared the average masses of extant and extinct species on different continents to try to understand whether size has an influence on extinction in mammals. We’ve done this by looking at the means and by comparing the histograms for extinct and extant species, but we haven’t done any statistics yet to actually test if the average sizes are different.

Perform a two-sample t-test to compare the average sizes of the extinct and extant species in each continent.

Save the results as a csv file named "size_comparison_results.csv", where the first column is the name of the continent, the second column is the average mass for the extant species, the third column is the average mass for the extinct species, and the fourth column is the p-value for whether or not they sare different.

[click here for output]