eli5: What is a nocturnal bottleneck?
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An evolutionary bottleneck is any kind of condition which cause any kind of animal not fitting a certain criteria to become extinct. All the remaining animals are evolved from those few who survived. The most famous bottleneck was the extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. Only smaller sturdier animals survived such as small flying dinosaurs, fish and rodents.
The nocturnal bottleneck is the proposed theory that the dinosaurs and crocodiles which reigned before that extinction event killed off any mammal active during the day. So all the modern mammals are evolved from animals which adapted to being nocturnal. Active during the night and hiding during the day. This would explain some of the stranger evolutionary features in mammals.
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