ABOVE: Mammal skull and lower jaw fossils from Corral Bluffs
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After an asteroid crashed into what is now Chicxulub, Mexico 66 million years ago, a chain of events occurred that caused dinosaurs to disappear and mammals to flourish. But figuring out exactly what happened after this event, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event, has been tricky due to a sparse fossil record. Yesterday (October 24), a team of researchers published a paper in Science detailing their 2016 discovery of a trove of plant and mammal fossils that sheds light on how ecosystems recovered after the asteroid impact.
The researchers, led by vertebrate paleontologist Tyler Lyson at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, have found over 1,000 vertebrate fossils, including 16 mammal species at the Corral Bluffs fossil site, located near Colorado Springs. They also found over 6,000 leaf fossils and 37,000 pollen grains, reports ...
