The end of the Eocene (~33.9 million years ago) was a rough time for many species. It was a period marked by global cooling and drops in sea level, and in Eurasia, these global environmental impacts led to a mass extinction of marine organisms, plants, and land animals known in Europe as the Grande Coupure. But it appeared as though mammals living in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula were spared, presumably thanks to their location near the equator’s warmth. Not so, says a paper published on October 7, in Communications Biology. Careful review of the fossil record from these areas revealed a mass extinction of at least five groups of mammals that coincided with the mass die-offs elsewhere.
In a Nature Ecology and Evolution perspective piece about the paper, study coauthor and evolutionary biologist Erik Seiffert writes how the team generated “lineages through time” plots based on previously built, time-scaled ...
