Projections of our future under climate change paint a picture of extreme weather and acidified oceans, a world many of today’s animals — including humans — may struggle, or fail, to survive. Yet despite overwhelming scientific evidence screaming at us to reverse course, humanity just keeps burning more fossil fuels, skidding past climate goals, and ramping up consumption. We don't really know what to expect from the climate we're hurtling towards. What might the world be like in 50 or 100 years? Maybe looking to the past can give us clues.
For prehistory fans, the Miocene, with its fantastic mammal life, is an immensely attractive period. From Dryopithecus, a lineage of extinct primates that included forerunners of humans, to the toxodonts, large-hoofed mammals with long, curved incisors, to mammals similar to sloths, armadillos and anteaters, to marsupial carnivores, this epoch that stretched from 23.03 to 5.33 million years ago was a glorious time of the weird and oddly familiar. The Miocene is even named using the Greek words for “less” and “new.”
