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Mammals Won the Dinosaurs' World
- Tagbert 4y agoActual article title “How mammals won the dinosaurs' world” makes a little more sense.
- CharlesW 4y agoInitial "How"s are auto-deleted during the HN submission process. Tip: It can be re-added by immediately editing the title after submission.
- rikroots 4y agoI think the title should have been "How mammals reconquered the world" as mammals descend directly from cynodonts and their relatives which were the dominant life form before the permian-triassic disaster. Cynodonts are synapsids, one of the two major branches of the amniote vertebrates. Birds descend from dinosaurs, which descend from sauropsids - the other major amniote branch. So the dinosaurs stole it from us because: disaster, then we stole it back because: another disaster. I adore Wikipedia! Of course if the doom-mongers are to be believed and our climate crisis becomes a runaway hothouse which devastates life across land and oceans in major disaster fashion then the birds are well-placed to take over again. I've never trusted them crows!
- bitwize 4y agoBut the surviving dinosaurs would live on to poop on the mammals' windshields in retaliation for being subjugated in the domination of the furry ones.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoCurrent estimate of # of chickens in the world right now is about 33 billion. They outnumber us by over 4 to 1. Their lives are short. And not very cheery. But I feel like they may have won? Or are we winning because we have them confined? :-)
- nordsieck 4y ago> Current estimate of # of chickens in the world right now is about 33 billion. They outnumber us by over 4 to 1. > Their lives are short. And not very cheery. But I feel like they may have won? Or are we winning because we have them confined? It'd say it's more domestication rather than confinement. The real creatures that are challenging humans are diseases and invasive species. So MRSA/Covid-19 and Africanized Honey Bees/feral hogs.
- smm11 4y agoMRSA is the real threat, IMO. I've been worried since Covid/masking/run-down immunities that this would really take hold, and we'd have a literal zombie outbreak. The feral hog bit doesn't concern me as much. I eat two or three pounds of that a week. Now if hog gives me MRSA, it's all over.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago7+ billion humans -- high calorie bags of protein and fat -- on the planet, mostly concentrated into tight urban areas, seems like one hell of a good ... food ... source for ... something.
- lmkg 4y agoBy "us" do you mean just humans? Because mammals certainly outnumber that many-fold. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few individual species that could out-populated chickens on their own, such as rats or squirrels.
- fritzo 4y agoThere are about as many mammals as birds, maybe a few more mammals. https://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/ https://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-the...
- hnplj 4y ago
- blueblimp 4y ago"The herbivore Ectoconus (a member of the Periptychidae, which may be related to living hoofed mammals, the ungulates) reached about 100kg (220lb) within a few hundred thousand years of the extinction. In geological time, that's the blink of an eye." It's interesting how fast evolution can move when there are open niches.
- entropicgravity 4y agoNot so fast. Even today there are more species of birds than there are species of mammals. You anti-birdites.