they even burrowed and nested together in social groups,

the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse was a greater botanical catastrophe than the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.

The backbone, which is horizontally oriented and perpendicular to the hind limbs in horses and mice and whales and basically all other mammals, rotated to become parallel to the legs, and took on a curved shape.

some fourteen hundred total—a diversity exceeded only by rodents.

What makes little sense is how the primates and rodents could then move westward from Africa to South America. There simply were no land routes, and the refugees must have dispersed across the water. They probably floated on rafts of rotting vegetation, flung off the African coast by storms, which then washed up in South America. Maybe they hopscot

Evolving alongside the angiosperms, in a coevolutionary waltz, were their pollinators:

special, new type of foliage was in control of the music, the driving force of Cretaceous evolution. These were the angiosperms, more commonly known as the flowering plants.

The Pennsylvanian trees—and the supersize dragonflies that buzzed around their branches and millipedes that scurried around their trunks—were able to grow so large because there was much more oxygen in the air then, some 70 percent more than today.

Their new molar design was key to their—or, I should say, our—success,