Re: walking with beasts fact files

Perhaps. The background info on the website is not, however. Regarding dinosaurs :-) : They write that phorusracids "were the continent[']s top predator for millions of years until the cats arrived from North America." They didn't die out then. There was a paper in JVP that a very large phorusracid stayed in Uruguay long afterwards, I forgot whether even into the Pleistocene. About Gastornis (no Diatryma mentioned -- great plus!) they write "There has been debate about what it used its enormous beak for. Some say it was for cracking nuts, another theory suggests it used the beak to crush bones." Not nuts, branches were suggested.

The family tree of mammals shows multituberculates outside the crown group, which is most certainly wrong, and a trichotomy of monotremes, marsupials and placentals because a few odd molecular trees find Marsupionta = (Monotremata + Marsupialia) without Placentalia. Yuck. Then they show Afrotheria and Xenarthra as sister groups -- this is at present correct with 33.3 % of probability, judging from the papers in Nature which all contain all alternatives. In the section on Afrotheria they consider it probable that Afrotheria arose by vicariance when Africa split off the rest of Gondwana -- that 100 Ma ago when crown-group Placentalia surely didn't yet exist. The page about Xenarthra doesn't mention the (doubtful :-) ) doubts on the identity of Eurotamandua. The tree given for Laurasiatheria is very small. Monophyletic Prosimia -- ugh. The text on multituberculates mentions twice that they survived into the Oligocene (I've read that rarely, and I'd like to know whether that's based on reworked fossils), but the phylogram shows them dying off before the end of the Eocene! Morganucodontids are shown continuing almost to the end of the Jurassic -- should have been the EJ alone. On marsupials they write "They seem to have evolved on [...] Gondwanaland, when it split from the Northern Hemisphere continents in the Jurassic" -- what a nonsense. "In the Late Jurassic, Australia split away from the rest of Gondwanaland, and took with it [...] marsupial mammals" -- no, in the late Eocene!!! "During the Cretaceous, North America joined briefly to the rest of Gondwanaland, and marsupials moved into the Northern Hemisphere, and placental mammals invaded the south" -- strange. There are EK NA metatherians like Kokopellia, and the LK to Miocene metatherians of NA are all outside the crown-group, unlike SA. Really basal metatherians (Deltatheridium, Holoclemensia) are entirely northern. It seems a lot more like meta- and eutherians invaded SA together around the K-T boundary. "the end of the Cretaceous [...] extinction [...] the fossil record around this time is restricted to just one place (Hell Creek in North America)" Nonsense. "The opossums, however, did well in Europe, and spread from there to Africa and Asia in the Oligocene as the separate continents came together again." Not the opposums, basal metatherians outside the crown group. Eocene ones are known from China and Pakistan, and LK ones from Mongolia. "During the Miocene, though, the forests began to give way to grassy plains, and the forest-adapted marsupials in Africa, Europe and North America became extinct." The first explanation I hear :-) -- nonetheless a short-sighted one -- primates survived. Orrorin is just 4 million years younger than the last NA metatherian before the opossums! Forests didn't disappear completely. In NA primates did die out in IIRC already the Oligocene (the last one is Ekgmowechashala), but not in Europe, let alone the rest of the Old World.