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c-casu · 2 months

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While herbivores diversified in the new Afro-Laurasian environment, generalists of all sizes, thanks to the very nature of their lifestyle, thrived almost undisturbed and were able to greatly expand their ranges.

Basal pigs, badgers and rodents all benefited from the interchange, but a new group, part of a lineage of smaller more basal elagids, the squealing heers (Eobrachylagus), in response to the new pressures expanded their diet and became more omnivorous, exploiting various feeding strategies such as scavenging, oophagy and insectivory, and becoming an extremely common animal across the continent, especially common around the tropical and subtropical areas.

Monkeys were mostly unaffected by the event, mostly inhabiting areas far from its contact points. Other than some baboons and other semiterrestrial cercopithecids reaching the northern coasts of the Mediterranean, the only lineage of primates that crossed into another continent was a descendant of Japanese macaques. Its ancestors island hopped to the mainland shortly before the interchange, and thanks to their adaptations to colder environments were able to quickly colonise the coasts of Siberia, and with the closing of the Bering strait to cross into North America. They didn’t radiate into many forms and are currently represented by a single species part of a monotypic genus, the Rockies snow monkey (Smithopithecus montanus). They inhabit a range that goes from Yukon to the rockies, and thus rarely interact with other native North American primate species, although young individuals sometimes come down to the prairies in search of better foraging grounds, where they’re confronted by the hostile macaca baboons (most Cyonuropithecini).

Weird specialists, such as the myrmecophages, were also affected by the interchange. The only major lineages present across the continents are African pangolins, spiny anteaters (hedgehogs that were able to become the dominant myrmecophages in Eurasia thanks to the extinction of the Asian pangolins), and tamanduas that rarely cross into the grasslands and steppe of North America. The latter were hardly affected, spiny anteaters, instead, thrived, with a range going from Florida to the Cape of Good Hope, at the expense, tho, of pangolins, whose only survivors were small arboreal forms in the Congo rainforest.

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