Steve Brusatte writes of the evolutionary twists, catastrophes and luck that led to the warm-blooded animals of today
which sets out to bridge the fascination gap. “Just imagine if whales were extinct, and all we had were their bones. I mean, they would surely be as famous, as fascinating, as dinosaurs.”
Along the way, Brusatte brings readers face to face with our distant ancestors, including the last common ancestor of mammals and reptiles: a small, scaly, swamp-dwelling creature that lived about 325m years ago. Soon, hair began sprouting, brains grew in size, and higher metabolisms developed. “When you look in the fossil record, you see there was this long story [over] tens of millions of years, when mammals were essentially assembled by evolution, piece by piece,” says Brusatte.
But another type of creature was also on the rise: dinosaurs. And as these beasts went big – a diplodocus was roughly the length of a basketball court – mammals went small. Brusatte is keen to stress that the pressure went both ways. “You never saw a triceratops the size of a mouse. And that’s because the mammals were keeping the dinosaurs big,” he says.
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