Life looked different after an asteroid crashed into the planet around 66 million years ago. The dinosaurs died out, the arboreal mammals declined, and the terrestrial mammals thrived. The traditional story that’s told is that the asteroid decimated the dinosaurs and that the decimation of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to trade the treetops for the ground.
But what if that traditional story is wrong? What if the mammalian transformation from arboreal to terrestrial was already underway at the time of the asteroid?
According to a new paper in Palaeontology, things might have happened that way, as the move from arboreal to terrestrial was already being made by many mammals before the asteroid arrived.
