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• Evolutionary Essentials
 Around 50 million years ago, Earth was recovering from a devastating mass extinction. All dinosaurs except birds had disappeared. Throughout the Mesozoic Era, mammals had lived in the shadows of the dinosaurs, quietly diversifying into different groups.
Of these mammal groups, only a few survived the mass extinction at the end of the Mesozoic Era, but they would live on to establish the Age of Mammals in the new Cenozoic Era.
Shifting continents and changing climates set in motion a key development in the process of evolution:
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Convergent evolution, which is when natural selection favors the evolution of similar features in completely different species faced with similar environmental challenges.
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With this development, we can see the same feature evolve in two different groups, at different times, on different continents.
Continue to Convergent evolution. >>
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