For thousands of years now, mammals have held dominion over the land. But it wasn’t always this way. According to a new paper, early mammals evolved before a massive asteroid hit the planet 66 million years ago and therefore lived briefly in the shadow of the dinosaurs.
They survived until an asteroid marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and the reign of larger dinosaurs. And then these early mammals exploded in diversity, leading to the world we see today.
New Conclusions From Old Fossils
The study published in Current Biology came to these conclusions through a statistical analysis of the existing fossil record, which comes from rocks younger than 66 million years ago, the paper says.
