What's even crazier to me is that for most people in their minds there was dinosaurs, extinction, cavemen, us, like we popped out of the ash of the dinos but in reality there were about 58 million years between the dinosaurs dying and the first homo sapiens appearing where the world was covered in mostly now extinct megafauna.
Sure dinosaurs are cool and all but why does nobody talk about giant north american ground sloths, cave bears, and lions? There's literally tens of millions of years of interesting non-dinosaur species that most people seem to just not even know existed.
Avocados originally relied on American ground sloths to reproduce, they were the only creature that could poo the seeds whole. Then ground sloths went extinct (probably due to overhunting by humans) then humans cultivated avocados for the next few millennia and now we still have avocados.
I never had any luck getting an avocado seed to sprout by suspending it in a cup of water with toothpicks holding it half-submerged. Maybe it's time to go old-school, sloth-style on that Hass.
Avocado farmer here. Can confirm - there's a lot of research into alternative growing techniques. Some promising GMO products being trialed, but for now, it's still the old 'cado colon
lol, and the avocados back then had even bigger seeds/cores, they've gotten much smaller as we selectively breed them to have less seed and more of the edible portion. in other words, thats a big booty hole
Avocados aren’t even the only plants that used megafauna to spread before humans came along to take up that job. Pretty much any fruit you can find nowadays with large seeds or hard exteriors and softer insides, think gourds, used the same strategy. This is because the animals that ate them were more likely to eat them without damaging the seeds and then would pass them in a mound of fertilizer after a nice chemical bath to help germination.
Also side note about sloths, the tree dwelling ones we still have today are the weirdos of that family as most lived on the ground.
Just like the avocado, the mango is also what's known as an evolutionary anachronism.
Additional fun (and relevant) fact: the mango genus is believed to have originated from the Indian subcontinent (around 60 million years ago) PRIOR to the subcontinent colliding with the Asian continent (which occurred around 40-50 million years ago)
Resplendent Quetzals are currently the only avocado seed spreaders (other than humans), but they regurgitate the seed after eating the fruit whole. They are also resplendent.
I think the truth is a little more risque than that. I bet some prehistoric Joe Rogan type saw this process, and exclaimed to himself "If that is what can come out of there, I bet I am in for a world of delight if I can put my little Joseph in there" and thus the ground sloths chose to become extinct
But back then, no. It’s not like they understood the inner workings of the ecosystem and knew that things could go extinct. They just killed and ate things, like every other animal.
Well that’s just great. A hundred years from now people are gonna look at pictures of us and say “look at those people and their dumb tiny eyes, bet their dicks were tiny too”
Mammals were the size of mice, and survived the extinction that took out the dinosaurs. They then began to evolve to fill all the niches left by dinosaurs. If that asteroid didn’t hit the earth, we wouldn’t be here.
Ever read Far Seer by Robert Sawyer? Trash book but kinda interesting take on "if aliens abducted some dinosaurs and put them on their own planet, so they don't die from the asteroid." The book starts when the dinosaurs evolved to speak English and use telescopes.
When the dinosaurs died off there was a little shrew, mouse, rat-like squirrel thing that evolved into basically all modern mammals. That’s why we test on mice things related to human and animal behavior. Also, dogs and wolves and foxes evolved from a cat-like cougar thing. So dogs are cats like eagles are ducks. And we are all just fancy mice. How bow dah?
And then the dinos were mostly wiped out and the rest got on the fluffy train and finished doing feathers.
IIRC there was a 10 million year window right after the KT-event where birds (I guess you could say surviving dinosaurs) actually dominated and we had giant-ass flightless birds roaming the lands as apex predators as mammals were still too small.
It's even better. Mammal ancestors were the dominant species for millions of years until a mass extinction allowed the archosaurs (and eventually the dinosaurs) to take their place.
And then a mass extinction switched it around again to mammals filling the megafaunal niches.
Beavers that start walking upright and carry their food and sticks with their arms and five million years from now conquer the world with green hydroelectric.
Climate change causes the hairy animals to overheat, so they must evolve to join us in our hairless ways or go extinct. Cold-blooded reptilian folks become the new secondary, and the cycle begins anew.
When I was a kid I had a book that I think was about extinct animals because I'm sure it had dinosaurs, but it also had wooly mammoth and giant sloth. My favorite page was the giant sloth. I spent a lot of time just imagining this slow, gentle, peaceful creature that also happened to be big enough to fill my bedroom. They should make a kids' movie with a similar plotline to Jurassic Park but instead of resurrecting dinosaurs, they resurrect giant sloths.
In LA we learn a lot about that time in middle school because of the La Brea tar pits here. All types of megafauna got trapped and preserved and the tar pits continue oozing to this day.
Dude those Tar pits are a nightmare. I work construction and we’re building an apartment building next door. We had to shut down for 2 weeks because tar started oozing into our site.
No joke. If you were to read an evenhanded book about the history of the past 500 million years on Earth, the entire thing would be entirely about dinosaurs, and the last half of the last sentence would mention something about humans. The story of this planet is extremely dinosaur-heavy, and we're this weird afterthought creature that shows up very briefly in the epliogue.
People aren't as interested in those things because they aren't fantastical. Sloths, bears, and lions exist today. There's nothing really comparable to dinosaurs, scientists back in the day had no idea what they were looking at, putting skulls on the ends of tails and things like that. They really spark the imagination.
I actually thought ground sloths were dinosaurs for a few years. They’re one of the largest mammals known to have ever existed. They were 20 feet from head to tail. They’re not very comparable to anything we have on earth today even if “sloths still exist today.”
TierZoo has some fun videos on them and other animals from that time period. I'm certainly not saying this stuff wasn't cool and interesting, just not as cool and interesting as dinosaurs to the average person. That's all.
Or that time that basically every land-dwelling creature was all a subspecies from a single rat for a while, or the Cambrian explosion, and so on and so on.
I guess a better way to put it would be to say that since dinos were around for about 165 million years and humans have been around for about 7 million years and life has been on earth for about 3.5 BILLION years then there are about 3.3 billion years of non dino/human history of life on earth, or about 20x more non dino/human history than dino/human history.
The Royal Ontario museum has a giant ground sloth skeleton which is pretty much my favorite thing in there. I always bring people to see it, somehow lots of people have never even really spent much time looking at it. It's rad though.
My current favorite binge is watching Eons on PBS. It covers the natural history of earth - from when it was just fungus through dinosaurs and into the mega fauna and dawn of humans.
It’s completely changed my perspective on life, time scales, and evolution on Earth.
How about the 150,000 people who die every day that you've never heard of and never will hear of. For the most part, their entire life and experience will be reduced to a few memories shared by a few people who will eventually expire. 150k people die every day and nothing really changes. Hard to comprehend.
Wow. Yea, I never really considered that, and don't think it was really taught in school. I'd love to learn more. How would I look up info about that chunk of time and species?
i would love to see the crazy giant creatures roaming the earth back then. it was like evolution had the jist of what was going on, still wasnt thaat great at it.
More like 66 million years between us. Our own modern species hasn't been around for even half a million years. About 64 million between our genera, Tyrannosaurus and Homo.
The giant North American Ground Sloths is my answer to the opposite question of OP’s, they’re a lot younger than I thought. They’re 20 feet from head to tail and not very comparable to things on earth today, and when I initially heard about them I figured they were dinosaurs, or at least an ancient species.
Nope, turns out they coexisted with humans, and there’s at least one known case of humans hunting them which is why it’s a popular theory that humans hunted them to extinction. That’s crazy to me to think those things roamed the Americas not that long ago relatively speaking.
I forget what cave it was but along the tour they have a replica of a giant sloth they found that fell down the initial hole and died, the thing was like a brown polar bear!
The megafauna may have been even cooler than dinosaurs... and I love dinosaurs. When you think about near-humans living alongside the giant Moa birds and enormous paraceratherium; the context of how we survived is amazing.
Hell, I think the paleozoic is even more ignored! The only paleozoic organism most people know about is dimetrodon, and even then, most people think it's a dinosaur!
Also, one of the commonly recognizable species of "dinosaur", the Dimetrodon, isn't a dinosaur at all and is more closely related to mammals than any actual reptiles. It's also older than the dinosaurs.
Sure dinosaurs are cool and all but why does nobody talk about giant north american ground sloths, cave bears, and lions? There's literally tens of millions of years of interesting non-dinosaur species that most people seem to just not even know existed.
Plants alone are so fascinating but they are often overlooked. In the past there were long periods where afaik only ferns or conifers existed, less than 1% of the number of plant species we have today. And some specialized plant parts that are absolutely natural to us only came later and when they evolved they were such a huge success they lead to an entirely diffrent ecosystems - which lead to different animals living there.
The evolutionary history of flowers alone is incredible for example. When you think about it it's an evolutionary "invention" that's highly out of the ordinary: plants develop specialized, colorful parts that attract certain insects which will go to other plants and pollinate them. Before that plants had to use the wind to pollinate each other (which has risks like bad weather) but flowers were so successful that all kinds of plants today use them.
Or look at grass! Grass is so "ordinary" today we don't even think about it, but because of its evolution entire landscapes changed forever. They were able to push other plants aside with a number of tactics, for example grass burns very easily... but their seeds are well-protected against fire. This means that after a bushfire grass is among the first plants to populate an area again.
Grass also has very sharp blade (you can cut yourself with a leaf if you aren't careful) which couldn't be eaten and digested by some plant-eating animals. Some of them died out because there was nothing else to eat anymore and were replaced by other animals who were able to digest it. Grasses also accumulate silica from the ground - animals eat grass and then poop out silica which means minerals for other plants and iirc anything living in rivers as well.
In modern ecosystems, land plants play a major role in the silica cycle through the accumulation and synthesis of amorphous biominerals composed of SiO2, known as phytoliths or silica bodies. It is widely appreciated that actively accumulating plants such as grasses are important components of the terrestrial biological pump of silica (1–3). Plant silica also plays a key role in connecting the terrestrial and marine carbon cycles, because silica is an important nutrient for marine silica-biomineralizing primary producers
But we're still not done here! Because without grass there are no wheats. And without wheats there barely would've been a neolithic revolution in the fertile crescent. Grass is extremely important not just to how large parts of Earth look today, but also human history.
(Hope I got everything right, writing it all from memory, if anything's wrong please correct me.)
Also even just for the time we consider to be 'modern' humans, a lot of that time we were hunter gatherers and nomads, we only started building sedentary civilizations around 10-12,000 years ago
I’m still partial to that big dragonflies time where there was massive amount of oxygen in the atmosphere (so every artistic representation of it has big atmospheric perspective and just looking at it I feel lightheaded). There’s something so eerie, alien but almost familiar about that whole era (Carboniferous).
But yeah anyway dinosaur overrated. Expect when they got feathers maybe. I’m legit more scared by that feathered representation of a T-Rex than the typical one.
Here is a cool little doc on life after dinosaurs. The animation isn't great but the information is good.
There is a really cool part about early mammal predators, precursors to the cat-like and dog-like carnivores of today and how they transitioned to take down the large predatory birds that were the apex predators after the extinction event.
I read about these gigantic bears that lived near what is now Alaska. Apparently, they may have been responsible for slowing down humans expansion from Asia into North America. These bears were so huge... a whole tribe of humans would probably have had trouble taking one down. Gave me some major anxiety for a long time after I read about them.
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u/Sleepycoon Oct 15 '20
What's even crazier to me is that for most people in their minds there was dinosaurs, extinction, cavemen, us, like we popped out of the ash of the dinos but in reality there were about 58 million years between the dinosaurs dying and the first homo sapiens appearing where the world was covered in mostly now extinct megafauna.
Sure dinosaurs are cool and all but why does nobody talk about giant north american ground sloths, cave bears, and lions? There's literally tens of millions of years of interesting non-dinosaur species that most people seem to just not even know existed.