In that vein, I recently finished reading Beasts Before Us by Elsa Panciroli, and it sorta begins where your post ends, with the end-Permian extinction and the rise of our synapsid ancestors, etc.

It also does a good job of explaining how diverse mammals have been as a clade, not just the groups we see today, but the vast diversity that existed in-between, the marsupials' metatherian cousins or the wild variety of Cretacious mammal niches.

https://www.amazon.com/Beasts-Before-Us-Origins-Evolution-ebook/dp/B092QZBLN6/

@p_calleri

ah okay, all‘s well that ends well, so let’s just carry on in our habitual ways until we’re all dead - is that what you’re saying?

I hope not. I don’t think we have the right to destroy the home of all our fellow species, thereby killing most of them, even if we were all okay with a collective suicide, which I’m not.

I volunteered on a couple dinosaur digs a long time ago and I asked the paleontologists there if they thought humans would be around in a million years. To a one they said "nope".

Chipping out a baby Parasaurolophus skull from solid rock, it was easy to imagine the wave upon wave of fabulous creatures that once roamed the earth at one time or another, only to become fossils by the time the next ones were leaving footprints in the sediments above them. In the future, in a length of time from now that is barely a rounding error in the last 4 billion years, Earth will be covered with another unimaginably weird and wild menagerie.

We're just messing it up for ourselves and the other creatures here at the moment. We could nuke ourselves 50 times over and the ecosystem from undersea vents would take over in a million years or two.

The idea that we're awesome enough to destroy the world is the same hubris that will lead us to destroy ourselves instead.