Discovery Rewrites History of Mammals
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 13, 2005; Page C01
Every single mammal learns from an early age that we used to get gobbled up by dinosaurs, that we were just a meaty little snack for the truly important animals of the Mesozoic, that we were small and meek and pathetic and cringing and whimpering and sniveling, locked into an extremely marginal evolutionary niche marked "Losers."
It's part of our mammalian heritage to pass this story on from generation to generation. Inevitably, our ancestors are described as mousy. "The size of a shrew" is a typical description. We came out only at night. Meanwhile the dinosaurs gallivanted all over the landscape, swinging their spiny tails around like they owned the place. We finally got our big break 65 million years ago when, luckily, a rock from space killed off the dinosaurs and much of life on Earth.
That story got amended yesterday,
life, from my point of view :)