The mammals who crawled out after the dinosaurs died, 66 mya

Due to a lucky find, paleontologists are putting the pieces together:

Lyson: I see this rock, this concretion on the ground. The very first one that I pick up and I crack it and it was amazing.

I just found a mammal skull.

Narrator: And that was just the beginning.

Ian Miller: It was crazy the way it happened. I mean, you could go your entire career as a mammal paleontologist and not find a skull from this time period. That’s how rare they are.

Lyson: We found I think 5 or 6 mammal skulls within about a 10-minute time span

.Ana Aceves, “Mammal Fossils Fill in Missing Piece of the Timeline of Life” at PBS Transcript

Here’s the vid.

It’s been hard to find remains from immediately after the K-T extinction that felled the dinosaurs 66 million years ago:

But an analysis of extraordinary deposits in Colorado, published in the journal Science, tracks life in exquisite detail over the crucial first million years after the K-T extinction

“If you had to choose one million years in Earth’s history that you really want to look at carefully, this would be it,” says palaeobotanist Ian Miller from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Dyani Lewis, “How mammals inherited the Earth” at Cosmos

Now, will those remains bolster textbook Darwinism or help sink it? Or in-between? We shall see.

See also: New evidence found for the asteroid that deep-sixed the dinosaurs

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