Size Of Mammals Exploded After Dinosaur Extinction, Researchers Confirm

[Moontanman]

Size of Mammals Exploded After Dinosaur Extinction, Researchers Confirm

 

The largest land mammals that ever lived, Indricotherium and Deinotherium, would have towered over the living African elephant. The tallest on diagram, Indricotherium, an extinct rhino relative, lived during the Eocene to the Oligocene Epoch (37 to 23 million years ago) and reached a mass of 15,000 kg, while Deinotherium (an extinct proboscidean, related to modern elephants) was around from the late-Miocene until the early Pleistocene (8.5 to 2.7 million years ago) and weighed as much as 17,000 kg. (Credit: Alison Boyer/Yale University)

 

ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2010) — Researchers have demon­strated that the extinc­tion of dinosaurs 65 mil­lion years ago paved the way for mam­mals to get big­ger -- about a thou­sand times big­ger than they had been. The study titled, "The Evo­lu­tion of Max­i­mum Body Size of Ter­res­trial Mam­mals," released in the jour­nal Sci­ence, is the first to quan­ti­ta­tively explore the pat­terns of body size of mam­mals after the demise of the dinosaurs.

 

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101125202007.htm