Elephant

• One of these – the Permo-Triassic mass extinction event – led to the demise of roughly 90% of Earth’s species.
• Most of these events have coincided with the formation of a supercontinent, where Earth’s tectonic plates slowly come together and combine.
• Scientists predict that Earth’s continents will again merge together in 250 million years to form a supercontinent called “Pangea Ultima”.

It’s going to get hot

• The primary reason behind this temperature rise is the projected location of Pangea Ultima, which would be centred on the equator.
• Our estimates also indicate that when Pangea Ultima eventually forms, the Sun will be 2.5% brighter than its present state.
• If we consider daily maximum temperatures and extreme weather events, then temperatures could potentially be pushed above 60℃ in some regions.

Inhospitable conditions

• For instance, humans cool themselves down during hot weather by sweating, while dogs rely on panting to dissipate heat.
• Prolonged exposure to such conditions can result in heatstroke, potentially causing swelling in critical organs like the brain.
• North American moose, for example, have a critical wet-bulb temperature threshold of 17℃ under calm conditions or 24℃ if it is windy.

Do mammals stand a chance?

• Second, during the PETM, the continents were positioned in a way that allowed mammals to move more easily towards cooler regions near the poles to escape extreme heat.
• This will make it challenging for mammals to travel long distances in search of cooler areas.
• What life form will become dominant if mammals do perish is anyone’s guess.

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• This is followed by Sri Lanka and the Maldives, joint second with New Zealand and Australia.
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• This next phase of activity called Mammoth 2.0 has seen further exploration of the site, where in 2019 and 2021 a 200,000-year-old mammoth graveyard was found.
• Peter Andrew, Group Director, Hills Quarry Products, said: "It's a fantastic site and it just keeps on giving.
• Hills Quarry Products specialises in the production and supply of quarry products and ready-mixed concrete to the construction and agricultural sectors.
• Hills Quarry Products is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Hills Group Limited, a privately owned family company established in 1900. www.hills-quarry.co.uk

• It’s reassuring to imagine that complex bodies and brains like ours are the inevitable consequence of evolution, as if evolution had a goal.
• However, by the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin showed that natural selection has no direction, and will sometimes make organisms simpler.
• If true, this could be a blow to our human sense of significance as the most complex organisms.
• While driven trends need not imply divine purpose, they at least suggest that complexity was mostly an improvement, which is reassuring for us humans.
• Rather than marching towards greater complexity, mammals evolved in lots of different directions, with only some lineages pushing the upper bounds of complexity.

Surely nature selects for complexity just a bit?

• These are most visible in our vertebral column (or spine) and ribs, and in the six-pack of a lean athlete.
• Counting the number of bones in different regions can quantify one aspect of complexity across all mammals.
• This suggests higher complexity can be a winning formula, and that selection is driving this in multiple branches of the mammal tree.
• Research into the evolution of complexity has only recently started gathering pace, so there is much we still don’t know.