Oct 14, 2019 10:48 PM
25 Details From History That Are Just So Gross
https://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-1458-...-so-gross/
INTRO: Look, we know it's tempting to be sentimental, but the truth is that no matter how hard you wish you lived in a previous time period, you would have been utterly miserable (or utterly dead). We don't like to make wild claims without backing them up with facts, so here are some facts that will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt how objectively horrifying our ancestors' lives actually were. (MORE)
Giant reptiles once ruled Australia. Their loss sparked an ecological disaster
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/...l-disaster
EXCERPT: . . . The new picture emerged after Gilbert Price, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia, and colleagues scoured the scientific literature on new fossil discoveries from the past 15 years or so. Added together, the finds showed that Australia had a much greater diversity of ice age reptiles than is widely accepted. These include 200-kilogram relatives of Komodo dragons, three to four times the size of those around today, and long-legged, land-living crocodiles. Price and others have also made new unpublished fossil discoveries that bolster the idea of a continent dominated by reptilian predators for much of the past 25 million years, up until at least 100,000 years ago.
“We think of the age of the dinosaurs as when reptiles like dinosaurs and crocs were dominant,” says Larisa DeSantis, a paleoecologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who was not involved with the research. “So, it’s exciting to think Australia was dominated by reptilian predators in its recent history.” Travouillon says the idea that Australia was once dominated by reptiles was first proposed in the 1990s. But it fell out of favor ... However, a better understanding of Australia’s fossil record is confirming “that originally the land predators were reptiles,” he says.
Most of these large reptiles, and the only large native mammal carnivores, had finally vanished by about 40,000 years ago along with Australia’s other megafauna, possibly because of changing climate. That left only small mammalian predators like the dog-size Tasmanian tiger and the even smaller Tasmanian devil to step into the role of apex predators across the continent. Price suggests these left ecosystems out of kilter.
Things got worse about 4000 years ago when people introduced the dingo ... But it was the European introduction of the cat and the red fox in the past 200 years that has caused the most damage. These animals devastated small marsupials, which had evolved alongside the reptiles but were not used to dealing with more intelligent and effective placental mammal predators... (MORE - details)
https://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-1458-...-so-gross/
INTRO: Look, we know it's tempting to be sentimental, but the truth is that no matter how hard you wish you lived in a previous time period, you would have been utterly miserable (or utterly dead). We don't like to make wild claims without backing them up with facts, so here are some facts that will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt how objectively horrifying our ancestors' lives actually were. (MORE)
Giant reptiles once ruled Australia. Their loss sparked an ecological disaster
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/...l-disaster
EXCERPT: . . . The new picture emerged after Gilbert Price, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia, and colleagues scoured the scientific literature on new fossil discoveries from the past 15 years or so. Added together, the finds showed that Australia had a much greater diversity of ice age reptiles than is widely accepted. These include 200-kilogram relatives of Komodo dragons, three to four times the size of those around today, and long-legged, land-living crocodiles. Price and others have also made new unpublished fossil discoveries that bolster the idea of a continent dominated by reptilian predators for much of the past 25 million years, up until at least 100,000 years ago.
“We think of the age of the dinosaurs as when reptiles like dinosaurs and crocs were dominant,” says Larisa DeSantis, a paleoecologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who was not involved with the research. “So, it’s exciting to think Australia was dominated by reptilian predators in its recent history.” Travouillon says the idea that Australia was once dominated by reptiles was first proposed in the 1990s. But it fell out of favor ... However, a better understanding of Australia’s fossil record is confirming “that originally the land predators were reptiles,” he says.
Most of these large reptiles, and the only large native mammal carnivores, had finally vanished by about 40,000 years ago along with Australia’s other megafauna, possibly because of changing climate. That left only small mammalian predators like the dog-size Tasmanian tiger and the even smaller Tasmanian devil to step into the role of apex predators across the continent. Price suggests these left ecosystems out of kilter.
Things got worse about 4000 years ago when people introduced the dingo ... But it was the European introduction of the cat and the red fox in the past 200 years that has caused the most damage. These animals devastated small marsupials, which had evolved alongside the reptiles but were not used to dealing with more intelligent and effective placental mammal predators... (MORE - details)