Harvard Researchers Discover Global Warming Spawned the Age of Reptiles

Artistic reconstruction of the reptile adaptive radiation in a terrestrial ecosystem during the warmest period in Earth’s history. Image depicts a massive, big-headed, carnivorous erythrosuchid (close relative to crocodiles and dinosaurs) and a tiny gliding reptile at about 240 million years ago. The erythrosuchid is chasing the gliding reptile and it is propelling itself using a fossilized skull of the extinct Dimetrodon (early mammalian ancestor) in a hot and dry river valley. Credit: Image created by Henry Sharpe

Harvard researchers find rapid evolution of reptiles was triggered by nearly 60 million years of global warming and climate change.

Researchers can explore the impact of environmental crises on organismal evolution by studying climate change-induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past. One principal example is the Permian-

In addition to their magnitude, the end-Permian extinctions are also important because they mark the onset of a new era in the history of the planet when reptiles became the dominant group of vertebrate animals living on land. Synapsids, the ancestors of mammals, dominated the terrestrial vertebrate faunas throughout the Permian. In the Triassic Period (252-200 million years ago), after the Permian extinctions, reptiles evolved at rapid rates, creating an explosion of reptile diversity. This expansion was critical to the construction of modern ecosystems and many extinct ecosystems. Most paleontologists believed these rapid rates of evolution and diversification were due to the extinction of competitors allowing reptiles to take over new habitats and food resources that several synapsid groups had dominated before their extinction.

However, in a new study published on August 19, 2022, in the journal Sciences Advances, researchers in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and collaborators reveal the rapid evolution and radiation of reptiles began much earlier, before the end of the Permian. This was in connection to the steadily increasing global temperatures through a long series of climatic changes that spanned almost 60 million years in the geological record.

Evolutionary response from reptiles to global…

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