Ancient mass extinctions may have prompted millipedes to eat meat

Ancient centipedes may have turned to scavenging animal remains out of desperation after the catastrophic plant died off at the end of the Permian period, about 252 million years ago. This could reveal how these mostly herbivorous creatures survived after the planet’s most devastating mass extinction.

David Greenwald at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa and his colleagues working in parts of the Karoo Basin in South Africa report finding fossils of early mammals…