Early mammals and their predecessors survived mass extinctions thanks to animals that possessed just the right amount of specialization.
The skulls of two ancient mammal relatives, including Varanosaurus from the Permian Period and Morganucodon from the Jurassic Period. Mammalian evolution didn’t happen in a straight line. For 320 million years, it has surged forward and crashed back down again amid successive mass extinctions, such as the one that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
“These same ecological adaptations – for gliding, climbing, eating diverse diets – have evolved repeatedly in the history of mammals and their close relatives,” said lead author David Grossnickle, an evolutionary biologist at the Oregon Institute of Technology, inThrinaxodon was similar in size and shape to a modern mink and lived during the Triassic Period. How Large Were Early Mammals?
As useful as these mortar-and-pestle teeth were, they didn’t come to the fore until a mass extinction wiped out the incumbent competition.
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