Ancient mammals were better adapted than nonavian dinosaurs to survive the Chicxulub asteroid impact.
Dinosaurs largely died off when a Manhattan-size asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago. Meanwhile, in the shadows, tiny mammals had steadily picked up adaptations that helped them survive the disaster and thrive in its aftermath, a new study suggests.
From the model,"the authors were able to determine that freshwater organisms and small terrestrial organisms" — including mammals —"were more resilient and better equipped to weather the extinction when compared to non-avian dinosaurs," said Thomas Cullen , a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, who was not involved in the study.
Back then, the environment of the now-western U.S. would have been similar to a modern Florida swamp, co-first author Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza , a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Vigo in Spain, told Live Science. Overall, the climate was slowly cooling toward the end of the Cretaceous, he said.
The modeling approach used in the study was originally developed to study modern ecosystems, co-first author Jorge García-Girón , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland and the University of León in Spain, told Live Science in an email. These models are challenging to apply to ancient animals because the fossil record is incomplete and generally biased toward large specimens, but the team made an effort to account for these factors, he said.
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