Mammals first increased their body size immediately after the dinosaur extinction, but their brains only started to get bigger about 10 million years later, according to new research.
“Honestly, I wasn’t expecting that at all,” says co-author Ornella Bertrand, a paleoneurologist at the University of Edinburgh. “I was like, ‘OK, something is wrong. … Why is your brain so small?’”
Herculano-Houzel disagrees. She says it’s not necessarily competition that triggered bigger brains in mammals, but just a good combination of plenty of food and no predatory dinos. Brains are incredibly expensive in terms of energy, she notes, so once some mammals got bigger, they could eat more and would have more energy to make larger brains. If competition alone triggered the brain increase, she says, smaller mammals would have disappeared. “But they never go away.
The 3D endocasts were detailed enough that Brusatte’s team could use subtle changes in the shape of the skulls to measure sensory regions of the animals’ brains, such as the neocortex and the olfactory bulbs and track how their size changed throughout time as the overall brain grew larger in the Eocene age.
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