In their scientific dissertation, researchers used advanced evolutionary modeling to present to the world the reasons for the survival of certain species immediately after the mass extinction in the Jurassic period. Studying the evolution of today's crocodiles in a completely new light required inserting a ton of evolutionary data into a new massive mathematical model. Scientists have learned that crocodiles, which today possess 25 similar but different species, evolved into their basic form called intermittent equilibrium.
Crocodile lines branched out at one point, while only certain subspecies evolved faster. However, two hundred million years later, this predator continued its slow trajectory. Weaker specimens became extinct during climate change similar to Milanković's glacial, with the strongest branches continuing their eternal path through time.
For crocodile species, the happy circumstance is a slow evolutionary flow, which has the right combination of the highest quality components, allowing them to survive all terrestrial conditions over a long period of time. Like tardigrades, or cockroaches, crocodiles possess the qualities of extremophiles and are far closer to them than any other species on the planet.
Scientists claim that this intermittent equilibrium occurs in organisms caused by higher external pressures, similar to mass extinctions, directly responsible for the latest release of modern crocodiles. Such purges on the planet Earth are associated with the mass emergence of new species as well, which intuitively has a certain meaning, although the researchers concluded that this is a case of smaller scale than previously thought.
In essence, when a planet suddenly remains almost empty and lifeless, in some new kind of climate change, or great extinction, perfect conditions are created for new mutations that can easily happen. If we compare today's crocodiles with the classic bell ringers of the seventies, their characteristics can be understood as something outdated and frozen in that era, a time when they were loved and seen as quality, but every day we encounter some of the most prominent details that allowed them to fashion trends. survive to this day. As scientists have concluded, the same equilibrium model can be applied to other living fossils, similar to turtles, for example.
Understanding the species that have survived long periods of time unchanged, as well as all those that disappeared during the great extinctions, helps other scientists to put together a complicated puzzle of huge periods in the evolutionary history of the planet Earth.