Post-Apocalyptic Fossils Show Rise of Mammals After Dinosaur Demise
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Post-apocalyptic fossils show rise of mammals after dinosaur demise
A revelatory cache of fossils dug up in central Colorado details as never before the rise of mammals from the post-apocalyptic landscape after an asteroid smacked Earth 66 million years ago and annihilated three-quarters of all species including the dinosaurs.
The fossils, described by scientists on Thursday, date from the first million years after the calamity and show that the surviving terrestrial mammalian and plant lineages rebounded with aplomb. Mammals, after 150 million years of subservience, attained dominance. Plant life diversified impressively.
With dinosaurs no longer eating them, mammals made quick evolutionary strides, assuming new forms and lifestyles and taking over ecological niches vacated by extinct competitors. Within 700,000 years of the mass extinction, their body mass had become 100 times bigger than the mammals living immediately after the mass extinction.
"Were it not for the asteroid, humans would never have evolved," said Ian Miller, curator of paleobotany and director of earth and space sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. "One message I would like people to take from this is that their earliest ancestors - and by ancestors we're talking fuzzy little squirrel-like critters - had their origins in the wake of the extinction of the dinosaurs."
The thousands of well-preserved animal and plant fossils, unearthed just east of Colorado Springs, illuminate a time interval that had been shrouded in mystery.
"Essentially, we were able to tease out details of the emergence of the modern world - the age of mammals - from the ashes of the age of the dinosaurs," Miller said.
Sixteen mammal species were discovered, with skulls and other bones fossilized after being buried in rivers and floodplains. Until now, only tiny mammal fossil fragments from that time had been discovered.
"For the first time, we were able link together time, fossil plants, fossil animals and temperature in one of the most critical intervals of Earth's history," said Tyler Lyson, the museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology and lead author of the research published in the journal Science.
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