Tibet was crossroads for giant rhino dispersal

The giant rhino, Paraceratherium, is considered the largest land mammal that ever lived and was mainly found in Asia, especially China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan. How this genus dispersed across Asia was long a mystery, ...

Throwing a warm sheet over our understanding of ice and climate

Temperatures at Earth's highest latitudes were nearly as warm after Antarctica's polar ice sheets developed as they were prior to glaciation, according to a new study led by Yale University. The finding upends most scientists' ...

Earliest-known treeshrew fossil found in Yunnan, China

Treeshrews are widely considered a "living model" of an ancestral primate, and have long been called"living fossils". Actual fossils of treeshrews, however, are extremely rare. In a paper published 14 January in Scientific ...

Fossils indicate common ancestor for two primate groups

(Phys.org) —Palaeontologists working in Tanzania have discovered the oldest known fossils from two major primate groups—Old World monkeys, which include baboons and macaques, and apes, which include humans and chimpanzees. ...

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Oligocene

The Oligocene (symbol OG) is a geologic epoch of the Paleogene Period and extends from about 34 million to 23 million years before the present (33.9±0.1 to 23.03±0.05 Ma). As with other older geologic periods, the rock beds that define the period are well identified but the exact dates of the start and end of the period are slightly uncertain. The name Oligocene comes from the Greek ὀλίγος (oligos, few) and καινός (kainos, new), and refers to the sparsity of additional modern mammalian faunas after a burst of evolution during the Eocene. The Oligocene follows the Eocene Epoch and is followed by the Miocene Epoch. The Oligocene is the third and final epoch of the Paleogene Period.

The Oligocene is often considered an important time of transition, a link between "[the] archaic world of the tropical Eocene and the more modern-looking ecosystems of the Miocene." Major changes during the Oligocene included a global expansion of grasslands, and a regression of tropical broad leaf forests to the equatorial belt.

The start of the Oligocene is marked by a major extinction event, a faunal replacement of European with Asian fauna except for the endemic rodent and marsupial families called the Grande Coupure. The Oligocene-Miocene boundary is not set at an easily identified worldwide event but rather at regional boundaries between the warmer late Oligocene and the relatively cooler Miocene.

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