Meet the animals that can handle extreme heat

From foxes to wombats, these creatures have adapted to life in the desert. But they’ll need to evolve even more quickly to keep pace with climate change.

Near Baja California, Mexico, the tropical sun warms shallow tidal pools to temperatures well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Yet even in this extreme environment, tiny crustaceans called tidepool copepods thrive.

Surprisingly, these Mexican copepods can handle temperatures about seven degrees hotter than populations of the same species in northern California. Even so, in laboratory experiments, the Mexican copepods quickly die when exposed to hotter water.

As the "organisms heat up, their proteins actually begin to melt," says Morgan Kelly, a biology professor at Louisiana State University who studies the two-millimeter-long crustaceans. (Read about the animals can can live in the hottest places on Earth.)

It's a sobering clue into