Vertebrates and Plant Power
A tiny carnivore, more than 300 million years old, helps reveal the origins of giant plant eaters....
A tiny carnivore, more than 300 million years old, helps reveal the origins of giant plant eaters.
When the first vertebrates - ancestors of all modern mammals and reptiles - moved onto land more than 300 million years ago, the only thing they ate were insects and invertebrates. It was tens of millions of years before they evolved to eat plants. Professor Robert Reisz, a paleontologist from the University of Toronto, Mississauga, is trying to understand this transition. In his latest work, he's discovered a tiny primitive insectivore that is ancestral to the first large land plant-eaters - a group called the Caseids.
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