Ancient mass extinction may have driven millipedes to eat meat


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Fossilised stays of an historic millipede with a mammal ancestor

David P. Groenewald

Historic millipedes might have turned to scavenging animal stays out of desperation after the catastrophic plant die-off on the finish of the Permian Interval, round 252 million years in the past. This might reveal how these normally herbivorous creatures survived after the planet’s most devastating mass extinction.

David Groenewald on the College of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa and his colleagues working in sections of the Karoo basin in South Africa report that they’ve discovered fossils of early mammal …