What makes them so interesting to me is they were found in layers of solid rock that date to the early part of the geological period called Eocene , which means they would be about 50 million years old. Some of the details about the dating of the discoveries.
Yeah, I think-- so oftentimes, you hear skeptics say, you know, it's been warm before in Earth's history, and life was happy. And that's true. Life was happy in the Triassic and the Eocene . There are crocodiles in the North Pole and there are palm trees in Alaska.
And I could sort of almost see the smile on the editor's face when he asked me to review this paper. But they did a computer simulation where they placed all the continents in the places they would have been back in the Eocene . And they recreated the climate, and the ocean currents, and so on.
According to the report, above the skeleton was a thick layer of slate rock that was unbroken. Now, the layers that he considered Pliocene are considered to be Eocene .
And at the rate we're going, we could reach those levels by the middle of the century. And if we keep on going, we could reach levels probably not seen since the Eocene , around 50 million years ago, by the end of this century. So obviously, what's significant about this is on the one hand, CO2 is just a greenhouse gas.
unless you're a paleontologist that were thriving. They eventually would go extinct, but in doing so, they would spin out the ancestors of the modern groups that we all know, including our own group, the primates. It was about 10 million years after the extinction. So we're talking about 55, 56 million years ago as the Paleocene interval turned into the Eocene interval of time. That's when the modern mammals really start to make their presence known. And this happens at a time when the Earth is undergoing this moment of harsh, sudden climate change, global warming,
the Cretaceous turned into the Paleocene, the age of dinosaurs, gateway to the age of mammals. But really, this greenhouse world of the dinosaurs persisted. The Earth was still very warm. There were no ice caps at the poles, for instance. Then the Earth got even warmer as the Paleocene turned into the Eocene with this spurt of global warming. It got so hot that there were crocodiles lounging in the shade of palm trees above the Arctic Circle. And the Earth stayed hot for a while, but then it started to gradually get a little bit cooler. The tide shifted there. And about 35
The glaciers grew into ice sheets. And that helped drive the temperature of the entire world to be much cooler. Now, this was a long-term trend then that continued to happen for many tens of millions how a land mammal turned into a whale. And the starting point of that story is somewhere around 55 million years ago. The Eocene interval of time is dawning with this burst of global warming.
I had to slip that in in case you forgot I was Catholic. I make it hot like the African sun, like the paleo scene, eocene , thermal maximum.