A boom in reptile abundance and diversity around 250 million years ago may have resulted from soaring temperatures beginning millions of years earlier, rather than filling the gap left by a mass extinction of mammals
The planet was already on a warming trend, but the eruptions spurred a roughly 20-million-year-long hot streak. While early mammal ancestors began dying en masse, reptiles appeared to evolve at breakneck speed, ranging from small gecko-like creatures on land to domineering ichthyosaurs at sea.
Simões and his colleagues spent eight years measuring and comparing museum fossils of extinct amniotes – the four-legged ancestors of mammals, reptiles and birds – that lived in a period spanning 70 million years before and 70 million years after the major extinction event. He compiled 348 morphological characteristics, like skull dimensions and tail length, for 1000 fossil specimens from 125 species.
Their statistical analysis revealed that reptiles were increasing in number and diversity around 40 million years before the dramatic explosions, indicating the reptiles’ success was tied to a warming climate, not the sudden loss of mammalian competition. “As you reach the peak of those climatic changes, reptiles were already evolving quite fast,” says Simões. “This takeover of reptiles was already under course.”at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “New climates themselves could be stimulating evolution to ultimately produce very diverse new forms,” he says., this stretch of warming happened relatively slowly.
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