Summary
Melting snow in the Italian Alps revealed a prehistoric ecosystem from the Permian period, predating dinosaurs by 280 million years.
The discovery, made by hiker Claudia Steffensen in 2023, includes well-preserved footprints of reptiles and amphibians, alongside traces of flora and invertebrates.
Paleontologists describe the find as unprecedented in quality and variety. The fossils, uncovered due to rising temperatures linked to climate change, highlight parallels between ancient environmental shifts and today’s climate crisis.
Researchers expect more discoveries as melting ice and erosion expose additional fossils.
What?! Pre-squid?! This is an outrage!
The Missing Ink
I will have you know that the world was created by The Great Squid in 7 days approximately 60 million years ago.
Give me time and I will tell you about how he had a squid gather up all the life in the sea two by two and put them in a big aquarium after the Great Squid punished the wicked by 40 days and 40 nights of no rain.
Get dunked.
The Great Flying Spaghetti Monster created the Universe and that exists out of boredom after indulging into too much beer and findings like these is just the GFSM messing with our colective hubris of knowing-it-all.
Those “fossils” were placed over night as decor, now that the ice melted.
Even now and then it just catches me how absolutely insane it is how long the planet sustained complex life without any humans whatsoever. We’re an evolutionary accident. A footnote consequence of unlikely circumstance. Were it not for a number of unlikely destructive events this planet might have quite happily continued ad infinitum with only dinosaurs on it. Can you imagine that, if this whole universe had happened and this one random blue marble had dinosaurs on it and not a single minded being anywhere to appreciate the magnificent insanity of it all?
I believe there’s some thinking now that dinosaurs weren’t doing all that well, stagnating, so without a meteor and volcanic activity they still would have changed in some manner eventually. But perhaps not enough to let the mammals fill any niches.
What gets me is how long life was on Earth just as single cell forms, and then suddenly, recently, it took off to bigger things.
The step from single to multicellular life forms is a metasystem transition, and those don’t roll back, and are amplified by branching growth at the penultimate level1.
Or, more concretely: A strain of cells learns to communicate with each other, to coordinate, giving all a fitness advantage in other words they create a control system to regulate the lot of them and apes together stronger than apes apart. The emergence of that (usually distributed) control system is a metasystem transition. Because that kind of cooperation has advantage over not cooperating like that, evolution never goes into the other direction (in that sense it has a direction, similar to how time doesn’t really exist in physical microstates, only in their relationship to macrostates: It’s not like genes can’t drift in the other direction, it’s that if they do they get culled at a much higher rate).
And because our critters now have an advantage, they have more resources to develop, to multiply both in absolute number, as well as to specialise into different functions. That’s the branching growth at the penultimate (that is, below the control system) level, and it makes them even more fit. Branching growth is one of those cybernetic laws that happen again and again and again and again and you’d think “surely this can’t always be the case” and yes you’ll find exceptions but by and large, yes, once there’s a metasystem transition you get that effect, again, because it’s very regularly beneficial to the whole.
If that got you consider the evolutionary step from soup of chemicals over the first feedback systems made out of simple molecules creating environments benefitting their own replication to actual cells. Which is explainable by chance alone, but once you take metasystem transitions into account suddenly it doesn’t take an eternity, any more, only aeons.
1 I should, possibly, at this point warn about Principia Cybernetica just as people warn about tvtropes. It’s a rabbit hole.
At the time of the K-T extinction, we looked like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatorius
The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event,[a] also known as the K–T extinction,[b] was the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth[2][3] approximately 66 million years ago. The event caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. Most other tetrapods weighing more than 25 kg (55 lb) also became extinct, with the exception of some ectothermic species such as sea turtles and crocodilians.[4]
Omnivores, insectivores, and carrion-eaters survived the extinction event, perhaps because of the increased availability of their food sources. Neither strictly herbivorous nor strictly carnivorous mammals seem to have survived. Rather, the surviving mammals and birds fed on insects, worms, and snails, which in turn fed on detritus (dead plant and animal matter)
Luckily, great-grandaddy squirrel-critter was a survivor and had a taste for insects:
It is thought to have been rat-sized (6 in (15 cm) long and 1.3 ounces (about 37 grams)) and a diurnal insectivore, which burrowed through small holes in the ground.
Yeah but on the other hand, big numbers on a screen.
It’s cool that, as we’re nearing our end, we’re at least learning more about the beginnings. Sort of has a poetic beauty to it.
I’m hoping that, in our hubris, we’ll re-create the environment that allows dinosaurs to rise again.
Birds inherit the Earth.
Correction in your summary, they date back to 280 million years, before the dinosaurs. Not 280M more years. That would be very old.
