Beasts Before Us: The Untold Story of Mammal Evolution

Presented by Dr. Elsa Panciroli, University of Oxford Museum of Natural History, March 9, 2023.
The story of mammal evolution is often told from a point after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. But the group's most ancient origins lie much farther back in time, over 300 million years ago, in the alien world of the Carboniferous. In the last 20 years, new fossils and technologies have unveiled the evolutionary path of the larger lineage to which mammals belong, the synapsids, from the first animals to walk on land to the diversity of modern mammal groups we see on our planet today. Dr. Elsa Panciroli charts the emergence of the mammal lineage from enormous beasts with faster metabolisms that made the world theirs long before the rise of dinosaurs, and explains how mammal miniaturization in the Triassic and Jurassic shaped our senses and life history.