When Mammals Became Mammoth
esearchers have demonstrated that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago made way for mammals to get bigger - about a thousand times bigger than they had been. The study, which is published in the journal Science, is the first to show this new pattern of increased body size of mammals after the exit of the dinosaurs.
“Basically, the dinosaurs disappear and all of a sudden there is nobody else eating the vegetation. That’s an open food source and mammals start going for it, and it’s more efficient to be an herbivore when you’re big,” says paper co-author Dr. Jessica Theodor, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary.