Word: mammals
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...that picture changed dramatically last week with the announcement in Nature of two impressive fossils. One, of a brand-new species dubbed Repenomamus giganticus, demolishes the notion that most dinosaur-age mammals were never larger than squirrels. The animal, which lived some 130 million years ago, had the dimensions of a midsize dog or large badger--by far the biggest dinosaur-age mammal ever found. And the second, a new specimen of a previously discovered species called Repenomamus robustus, refutes the notion that it was always the mammals that got eaten. Inside the skeleton where the animal's stomach would...
...lately Archer, among others, has begun to view Riversleigh as more than just a portal into the ancient past. It is also, he believes, a harbinger. In stunning detail, Riversleigh chronicles a collapse in Australia's mammal diversity in the past 25 million years. Archer warns that if humans don't stop abusing the earth and "incarcerating our precious biotas in reserves that are demonstrably too small to sustain them," we could jeopardize our survival as a species. Alarmist? Keep in mind, he suggests, that the average mammalian species hangs around for 5 million years; Homo sapiens has been around...
...South Wales, will speak for an hour, without a stumble or misplaced word, about the scope of discovery at World Heritage?listed Riversleigh and the strange beasts that used to live here. In 1983, Archer says, "in one rock, in five minutes, we found 35 new kinds of mammal. Not just species - like one kind of kangaroo versus another - but whole groups of things that are as unique as, say, whales are." Two years ago, Nissen and geologist Elizabeth Price discovered a plentiful site on ground that teams had walked over a hundred times previously: a bushfire had cleared away...
...first time in the history of the earth, as far as we know, that one species has caused a mass extinction - and we're in the middle of it." The issue is land: areas smaller than 300,000 sq. km have, Archer says, "no long-term viability to maintain mammal lineages. That's an order of magnitude greater than the biggest reserve we have in Australia - Kakadu - and it's certainly much bigger than anything in the U.S. So globally, this is a problem." Archer often runs up against the view that it doesn't much matter if humans exterminate...
...masked palm civets from Guangdong wildlife markets and farms that commenced last week has only exacerbated the sense that matters had been spiraling out of control. Forestry officials incinerated some civets, boiled others to death and drowned still more in disinfectant. Also called a civet cat, the small, furry mammal with big innocent-looking eyes is unrelated to real cats, being more of a first cousin to the mongoose. Nevertheless, it was as if China was sacrificing thousands of animals to ward off the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse...