Ancient mass extinction may have driven millipedes to eat meat

Ancient millipedes may have turned to scavenging animal remains out of desperation after the catastrophic plant die-off at the end of the Permian Period, around 252 million years ago. This could reveal how these usually herbivorous creatures survived after the planet’s most devastating mass extinction.

David Groenewald at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa and his colleagues working in sections of the Karoo basin in South Africa report that they have found fossils of early mammal …