Or something. A recent article in Mail online tells us that beaver-like creatures lived along side dinosaurs, adapted to their menacing ways by nibbling flowers and even outlived the cataclysmic event that killed them off.
Revealed: the secret of the peaceful beaver-like mammals which lived alongside the dinosaurs for 20 million years
When the dinosaurs ruled the earth, some mammals actually flourished – living alongside the lizards for 20 million years.
And the secret of the creatures’ survival was not huge fighting prowess – the rodent-like creatures adapted to eating flowering plants.
They even survived the ‘mass extinction event’ which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago – thought to have been caused by an asteroid or volcanic activity.
See while everyone else was being big and terrifying (or little and fast) the mutituberculates decided that rather than chase down a meal every day they would consume a renewable resource that would be there again for them tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. In fact, since they were pruning these flowers and dropping their bits in all over the countryside, the flowers actually increased meaning that even when things got scarce for everyone else they weren’t scarce for our flower eating beaver-like heroes.
And the moral of this story? Use renewable resources or go extinct. Makes sense to me.
Although not known to many people, they have a 100 million-year fossil history, the longest of any mammalian lineage.
What eventually wiped them out? Horses and rodents, which we’ll talk about later. Examples like Castoroides the giant beaver that roamed the earth.
