Harvard researchers find rapid evolution of reptiles was triggered by nearly 60 million years of global warming and climate change. Researchers can explore the impact of environmental crises on organismal evolution by studying climate change-induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past. O
Artistic reconstruction of the reptile adaptive radiation in a terrestrial ecosystem during the warmest period in Earth’s history. Image depicts a massive, big-headed, carnivorous erythrosuchid and a tiny gliding reptile at about 240 million years ago. The erythrosuchid is chasing the gliding reptile and it is propelling itself using a fossilized skull of the extinct Dimetrodon in a hot and dry river valley.
In addition to their magnitude, the end-Permian extinctions are also important because they mark the onset of a new era in the history of the planet when reptiles became the dominant group of vertebrate animals living on land. Synapsids, the ancestors of mammals, dominated the terrestrial vertebrate faunas throughout the Permian. In the Triassic Period , after the Permian extinctions, reptiles evolved at rapid rates, creating an explosion of reptile diversity.
Previous research on the impacts of these changes often neglected terrestrial vertebrates due to limited data availability, focusing mostly on the response from marine animals Reptiles were relatively rare during the Permian compared to mammalian ancestors. However, things took a major shift during the Triassic when reptiles underwent a massive explosion in the number of species and morphological variety. This led to the appearance of most of the major living groups of reptiles and several groups that are now entirely extinct.
“One reptile lineage, the lepidosaurs, which gave rise to the first lizards and tuataras, veered in the opposite direction of most reptile groups and underwent a phase of very slow rates of change to their overall anatomy,” said Simões, “essentially, their body plans were constrained by natural selection, instead of going rogue and radically changing like most other reptiles at the time.
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