Life on Earth after the dinosaurs: Age of the mammals
About 66 million years ago, a mass extinction event wiped out 75% of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. Yet our mammalian predecessors survived and evolved to thrive in the space left by the dinosaurs. But how? That is the multi-million dollar question EOAS Associate Professor Kendra Chritz and her co-investigators are setting out to answer.
Having been awarded a prestigious and highly competitive $3M USD (~$4M CAD) grant from the Frontier Research in Earth Sciences (FRES) program at the National Science Foundation, the project titled, “How did Terrestrial Ecosystems Rebuild Following the Cretaceous/Paleogene Mass Extinction?”, truly is a multi-million dollar question. The funding will allow a team of geochemists and paleo-ecologists from institutions across North America to study a unique outcrop where terrestrial plant and animal remains from the earliest Paleogene, immediately following the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event.
The fossils at Corral Bluffs, Colorado are an extremely rare, comprising extraordinarily well-preserved terrestrial plants and mammals. Terrestrial environments are not typically ideal for fossil preservation. As a result, little is known about how life on land (compared to marine life) adapted and evolved to flourish following the K-Pg mass extinction. However, the ancient wetlands that once existed over Corral Bluffs created the perfect ‘Goldilocks’ conditions needed to capture a snapshot of life on Earth in the years just prior to and following the mass extinction event.
As an expert in minimally-invasive geochemical analysis of fossils, Prof. Chritz was approached by the team at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to join the project. The ratios of various elements preserved in plant and animal fossils will allow Prof. Chritz and her colleagues to reconstruct ancient climate, environment and food webs. These reconstructions will allow the team to describe how land plants rapidly diversified during the early Paleogene, and how, in turn, early mammals evolved to take advantage of newly available food sources and fill ecological niche spaces left behind by the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Now, living in the era of mammals, much is still unknown about how our earliest lineages rose to prominence. As this study aims to unlock some of these mysteries, it has received significant attention from the media, including Vancouver is Awesome, Richmond News, Burnaby Now, Tri-City News, North Shore News, Squamish Chief, Delta Optimist, New Westminster Record, Powell River Peak, Pique NewsMagazine. You can also tune into CBC’s Daybreak North show, aired on August 21, 2023 to hear Kenra Chritz describe the research in her own words (starting around 1:14:40).