WASHINGTON - 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.
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.
“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. The asteroid strike, which ended the Cretaceous Period and opened the Paleogene Period, laid waste to the world, eradicating the dinosaurs except their bird descendants, seagoing reptiles that dominated the oceans, and important marine invertebrates and numerous plant species.
Within 100,000 years of the extinction event, mammals reached about 13 pounds . By 300,000 years after the extinction, they got to 55 pounds , with the first purely herbivorous mammalian species. By 700,000 years after the asteroid, some mammals weighed more than 110 pounds .
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