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tech / sci.bio.paleontology / The world immediately after the K-T extinction event

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o The world immediately after the K-T extinction eventOxyaena

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The world immediately after the K-T extinction event

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From: oxya...@invalid.invalid (Oxyaena)
Newsgroups: sci.bio.paleontology
Subject: The world immediately after the K-T extinction event
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2021 09:57:07 -0400
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 by: Oxyaena - Sat, 3 Apr 2021 13:57 UTC

The state of the globe immediately (immediately meaning several thousand
years or so) after the K-T extinction was a much reduced one, a mere
shadow of its former self, but even so, there was still hidden gems of
life to be found. After all, I wouldn't be here typing this right now if
it weren't for those hardy survivors that were my very distant
ancestors, and they were also your ancestors, dear reader.

The trophic web was extremely impacted by the extinction, and at most
any apex predators out there would've been crocodiles and snakes. This
left a huge amount of niches vacant and ripe for the taking, and I argue
mammals were uniquely suited to the task. Birds, for all their
evolutionary advantages, are far too specialized to have taken the
niches that would've otherwise been available to warm-blooded critters
such as themselves, although the birds did end up carving out a spot for
themselves in the global ecosystem, it was not the spot their
dinosaurian ancestors filled except for very rare circumstances, and as
we have seen very recently in the Holocene, whenever mammals (namely,
us) come knocking, the birds go flocking, if you'll excuse the metaphor.

Mammals were suitably generalized enough while also being endothermic to
pick up on these niches, and while for a time reptiles did do well in
competing with mammals, in the end it was the mammals who would reign
supreme. Ie mammals came with the right adaptive suite to be primed to
take advantage of these vacant niches when the opportunity came
knocking, namely after the mass extinction that caused the ecological
slate to be wiped clean in the first place. In just a few hundred
millennia mammals had already filled the niches of large predator and
herbivore across the globe, and again, while there were exceptions to
the rule, the Cenozoic ain't called the "Age of Mammals" for nothing.

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