They scurried in the shadows of dinosaurs for millions of years until a killer space rock created a new world of evolutionary opportunity.
Every spring I bring my students to the desert of northwestern New Mexico, just north of Chaco Canyon, where the ancestral Pueblo people built a great city out of rocks a millennium ago. As we hike across the pastel-striped badlands, we can’t help but tread on dinosaur bones. The ground is littered with busted Tyrannosaurus rex limbs and chunks of vertebrae that anchored the lofty necks of sauropods some 66.9 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. And then, suddenly, the bones disappear.
How Mammals Conquered the World after the Asteroid Apocalypse
Every spring I bring my students to the desert of northwestern New Mexico, just north of Chaco Canyon, where the ancestral Pueblo people built a great city out of rocks a millennium ago. As we hike across the pastel-striped badlands, we can’t help but tread on dinosaur bones. The ground is littered with busted Tyrannosaurus rex limbs and chunks of vertebrae that anchored the lofty necks of sauropods some 66.9 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. And then, suddenly, the bones disappear.
How Mammals Conquered the World after the Asteroid Apocalypse