I was introduced yesterday to the FIMS hypothesis by PBS Eons.
The Fungal-Infection-Mammalian-Selection (hey that ryhmes!) hypothesis asks the question of why reptiles didn’t bounce back as much as mammals did after the asteroid K/Pg extinction event.
After all, they need less energy than mammals as cold-blooded creatures, and they produce way way more offspring than mammals.
One theory is fungi: there was an explosion in fungal activity after the asteroid due to the now dark and dingy hellhole the Earth became, and a ton of fungal spores were floating around at the time, as seen in geological record.
Apparently fungal infections are not that deadly to mammals (it just irritates us), but were disastrous for reptiles. Plus us mammals had a new food source in the absence of plants and meat.
There’s no conclusive proof, still, it’s an interesting theory as to why the dinosaurs didn’t bounce back and why us mammals took over.
Depends on the type of fungus, fungal infections from birds, bars, and the ground are quite serious infections, and often require toxic anti fungal to kill it. If you heard amphotericin B, it’s used to treat lethal fungal infections, but it’s a toxic agent. Candida can be quite serious in immunocompromised people, but is was originally often found in people with hiv. Mammals were quite smaller and they could survive on less food, plus their niche was mostly small or nocturnal insects around the time of the dinosaurs, and most insect and plant orders survived the extinction event.
Bats themselves are mysterious as they don’t know when they evolved, or what animal they came from. Just like bed bugs which came from bats, but nobody knows where their origins came from
yeah that’s true at mammals already being quite small at the time of the extinction event, and so already having an upperhand from a scale aspect.
oh wow I did not know that bats had an unclear origin! I just read up a bit and it sounds like the Onychonycteris and Icaronycteris fossils suggest some kind of tree-hanging mammal, but records are spotty.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/uncovering-bat-evolutionary-origins/
Are any reptiles vegetarian? Other than turtles? Can they eat mushrooms?
https://reptilehow.org/lizards-that-are-vegetarian/
Green Iguanas and others consist on a leafy diet
As for can they eat mushrooms, apparently Bearded Dragon’s and other common pet lizards should NEVER eat mushrooms, but that in the wild, there are some that dig up specific varieties and eat it
Hmm very mammalian
You know, I was convinced that my chickens would eat any leftovers from the fridge that were about to go bad, but the one thing that they wouldn’t touch was mushrooms. I didn’t realize that the reason for that went all the way back to the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs.
That’s a cool fact, do you have a source I could check out and read through? I tried some light web searching but couldn’t find anything saying this.
No, it was just an observation about the backyard chickens I used to have. I have no idea if my chickens couldn’t eat mushrooms or if they just didn’t care for them.
ahh, that makes sense, thanks. Yeah, in what brief research I did, it does appear like there are a lot of mushrooms that aren’t safe for chickens and lizards, possibly due to their biological differences, but that there were still a good number of mushrooms they could eat.
The interesting thing you were alluding to is that they have some biological instinct to not eat shrooms because maybe it wiped a lot of them out at one point. That’d be super cool to link :)
