New research by Duke University scientists published this week reveals a mass extinction that occurred 30 million years ago. According to research, after drastic climate change, 63% of mammal species had disappeared from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
This climate change was characterized by a change in the Earth’s climate from swampy to icy. “The Earth cooled, ice sheets expanded, sea levels fell, forests turned to grasslands, and carbon dioxide became scarce,” the report said. The report further said that in Europe and Asia about two-thirds of the species known at the time had become extinct.
A team of researchers from the United States, England, and Egypt studied fossils from five groups of mammals, which were: a group of extinct carnivores called hynodonts, two rodent groups, anomalies (scaly-tailed squirrels), and Histicognatha (a group that includes porcupines and naked mole rats). The other two were primate groups, the strepsirrhines (lemurs and lorises), and our own ancestors, the anthropoids (apes and monkeys).
Then, the team constructed an evolutionary tree from data collected from different fossil fuels for different sites in Africa. From this evolutionary tree, the researchers then pointed to the new lineages that emerged and the time frame of a species’ existence and extinction.
Researchers previously believed that the species that existed in Africa at the time may have survived. But this study showed that those species also faced the same fate as species from Asia and Europe.
“It was a real reset button,” said Dorian de Vries, one of the study’s lead authors and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Salford.
The tip that led to this research for the scientists was the teeth of those animals. What a mammal eats can be known from its molars. It refers to the environment in which the animal lived. The rodents and primates studied a few million years ago had a different set of teeth, the report said.
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