The cool thing about following the evolution of the mammals is that we can trace the development of parts of our own bodies. Later on, the Dimetrodon descendants became small furry mousy creatures while the dinosaurs took over the apex predator niches, and the mammals had to wait for better times to grow big again. The first real big apex predator of the time, Dimetrodon, a creature often included in the plastic dinosaur collections in toy stores, was a stem-mammal and not a dinosaur. One lineage evolved into reptiles and dinosaurs, the other into proto stem-mammals and eventually into real mammals. This book doesn’t start the timeline at the meteor crash but way before, before the Dinosaurs, in the late Carboniferous and early Permian, where the lineage of four-footed animals split in two. That’s exactly Brusatte’s first important point. ![]() The previous book even ended with a cliffhanger: a giant meteor crashed into the Earth and killed off the Dinosaurs! Oh no! Read on to find out what happened next! Actually, I hear all you science geeks exclaim, ACKshually, you’re pretty wrong there, because (a) dinosaurs still exist in the form of birds, and (b) the story of the mammals doesn’t start with the meteor crash. ![]() ![]() As a kind of sequel to his previous book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2018), popular science writer Steve Brusatte now looks at the evolutionary history of the mammals.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |