@prototropo

1 year ago

It's really illuminating to have all the clades mentioned, with selected illustrations. Because otherwise, I think it's too easy to settle into our easy memory of the big or charming mammals, like tigers, rabbits, armadillos, bears, kangaroos, beavers, antelope, platypus, lions, boars, zebras, sloths, elephants, bats, giraffes, moles, rhinos, foxes, anteaters, porcupines, monkeys and whales. In other words, all the animals that get a place of honor in childhood media programming because they lend themselves to caricature for graphic images and personality for animated cartoons. But those media ignore the beauty and intrigue of rare, unexpected and less familiar species of the enormous mammalian evolutionary tree. Consequently, even adults with PhDs in mathematics or chemistry might not know the difference between the sugar glider, flying squirrel and fruit bat, and how distant or different their origins. The distinctions we easily absorbed about dinosaurs, thanks to great books and movies about them, haven't been extended to the general grasp of equivalent distinctions in mammalian evolution. Most people, for example, assume seals, manatees and whales are closely related, which is far from the case. The reasons they have dramatically different ancestry are utterly fascinating, and yet the evolutionary history of mammals are probably far less understood by the supposedly educated public than are dinosaurs, living reptiles or birds. How many kids or science-literate adults can confidently describe the differences between monotremes, marsupials and placentals? Probably far fewer than those who can explain the pterosaur, ichthyosaur, dinosaur divide. And that ignorance begins with widespread unfamiliarity about the earliest branching of synapsids and sauropsids, far earlier in the history of terrestrial animals than almost anyone understands--many millions of years before dinosaurs thundered over the Earth, or into our imaginations, or across modern movie screens! The film and book industry really should see the mammals' story, in the Cenozoic especially, as the goldmine it could be for educational textbook and entertainment creativity. Oh, and perhaps museum collections, university graduate programs and research grants, as well?

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