Down, Down, Deeper and Down

Ictidosuchoides also survived the extinction

We've all heard of the extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, leaving the mammals free to diversify and take their current role (along with the birds) as the most visibly numerous land-dwelling vertebrates. But this was not the only major extinction event in the history of the Earth.

How many there actually were rather depends on how big one has to be before being considered 'major'. Part of the reason that we can divide geologic history into so many periods and other subdivisions is that many of them ended with an extinction event of some sort, so that the creatures living afterwards looked different from those living beforehand. But that's not always the case, and, anyway, not all extinctions were equally large and dramatic - at least so far as we can tell from the fossils left behind.

Dog-toothed Beasts from the Time Before Dinosaurs

Endothiodon

What sort of animals did mammals evolve from? For birds, the answer is simple: they evolved from reptiles, and specifically, from dinosaurs. (Which is why we say, using the modern definitions of things, that birds are dinosaurs). With mammals, though, the situation isn't quite the same.

The first mammals appeared around 225 million years ago, not long after the first dinosaurs did. However, they were not descended from reptiles, but from an entirely separate evolutionary line - the Synapsida - that had lived alongside the reptiles for a very long time. Yes, if you go back far enough, reptiles and mammals do have a common ancestor, and that animal would have looked, to modern eyes, more like a reptile than it does a mammal. But it wasn't a reptile, not in the modern scientific sense, and it belonged to a group of animals that just aren't around any more.

But between the point when that animal lived, and the first mammals appeared, there were a whole host of other, non-mammalian, synapsids. We often divide these creatures into two broad "grades" of evolution: the early, reptile-like, pelycosaurs, and the later, more mammal-like, therapsids. (In fact, of course, the two lived together for quite some time - it's not that one simply turned into the other. Evolution is more complicated than that). A greatly simplified tree of the "true" therapsids is included below, and shows that early mammals had rather a lot of relatives.