James Fodor
speaker
3,084 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 30 Aug
James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They are the last known grouping of non mammaliaform synapsids, so they persisted right up to the early Cretaceous.
Most of them were thought to have been herbivorous, and shared many c traits in common with mammals, but there were some differences in the in the skeleton.
So during most of the Mesozoic era the
The only synodonts that were around were mammals and a couple of closely related groups, so the mammaliaforms, and then the tritolodonts.
Um and neither of these were particularly diverse.
As I said, mostly they were fairly small insectivores or small predators, uh kind of roughly shrew like in their overall appearance.
Um and and they sort of played second fiddle, if you like, to the um dominant land animals at the time, which were the dinosaurs, as well as um
Some other
reptile forms like the Pseudosukians, for example, the Crocodilian lineage.
The Tritillodonts did die out in the early Cretaceous, so um by the end of the Cretaceous it was only the mammaliaforms left.
And in fact there were only a couple of species that were not part of not part of crown mammals.
So
Essentially by the end of the Cretaceous, the the mammals were all that was left of the Synapsid lineage.
Um so all of the pelicosaurs had gone extinct long ago, the non-cynadont therapsids all went extinct by the end of the Triassic, and then um the surviving non-
Mammaliform cynodonts also went extinct by the early Cretaceous, so it was just the mammals left.
You know, and if you'd if you'd looked at the time, um
a little bit before the end of the Cretaceous, it might have looked like that the whole synapsed lineage was on the path to extinction because there were so uh so few species left and so little diversity left.
But um as it turns out, mammals started diversifying in the last five or ten million years of the Cretaceous quite significantly.
You see a big uptick in the number of different species and the um sort of morphological variation.
Many of the
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