https://gregladen.com/blog/2008/02/10/mammals-and-the-kt-event/ Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:06:43 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 https://gregladen.com/blog/2008/02/10/mammals-and-the-kt-event/#comment-3715 Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:06:43 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/02/10/mammals-and-the-kt-event/#comment-3715 It should also be noted that the study was focusing on extant mammal groups; there was a radiation of mammals after the K/T event that left no living descendants are therefore are not part of the supertree (the authors, if I remember correctly, recognize this).This paper has come under fire, though, particularly in a paper recently published in PLoS. Another study by Wible et al. published last year also suggests that the fossil evidence does not support the hypotheses of the supertree paper.As for the “terror birds,” some were likely predatory, but the issue is still controversial (I don’t think that the large birds were somehow keeping the mammals down, at least not at anything more than a very localized scale). I’ll have to read up more on that, though, as I don’t want to be so vague.Overall there is a lot of skepticism of molecular clocks among paleontologists, and from what I’ve seen in the wake of this paper the paleontological evidence is at variance with the model of mammalian divergence proposed in the supertree paper.

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