Hopeful monsters

 

I´m still trying to process this as we speak. Our man Anton discusses LOME a.k.a. the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction. Which I´m sure you never heard about. Yet, your evolutionary grandmama might very well hail from this period of Earth history about 445 million years ago. The short story is that a series of radical changes in the Earth´s climate became too much for the dominant species at the time, which included jawless fishes known as conodonts and a number of peculiar squid-like molluscs. Jawed fishes did exist, but were few and specialized. Guess what happened next?

Thanks to LOME, jawed fish from isolated habitats in what is now southern China - where they had diversified in standard "hopeful monster" fashion - could start spreading throughout the oceans, filling the now empty ecological niches. Anton, ever the optimist, even refers to what happened as an "ecological reset". Something similar happened after the disappearence of non-avian dinosaurs, when mammals could freely radiate and take over. And here we are!

Not addressed in this happy video is the ecological reset after *we* are gone. Who knows, maybe jawless fish will again take over the oceans? That would be a fitting revenge after all these years!