From the Dinosaur Collector

The Paleocene 65 million years ago the dinosaurs became extinct and the Mesozoic ended. The Cenozoic is divided into two parts the Tertiary and the Quaternary.  The Tertiary lasted 63 million years and continued the flora which began developing at the end of the Cretaceous.  Flowering plants continued to develop but grasses are not wide spread. Forests are common.  The climate is warm even in the polar regions.  Conifers remain wide spread but the  number of species are not numerous. Asia seems to have been cut off from Europe. Primates are wide spread looking like Lemurs and Wood chucks. The impression is of an ecology that favored browsers and arboreal animals.      update 082107                                      

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Not only are the non avian dinosaurs gone but the the demographics of the mammals population have changed. In the Cretaceous marsupials and multituberculates dominate with placental mammals being a minority. Placental mammals are dominate in the earliest Paleocene in the northern hemisphere with a handful of multis remaining and even fewer marsupials. The multis are most closely related to modern egg laying monotremes and are reconstructed as squirrel like animals. The evolution of modern rodents in Asia would be the end of them. The early archaic hoofed animals are the most diverse were not large some looking like raccoons and others being meat eating. The largest mammals are pantodonts, tillodonts and taeniodonts.

The Paleocene must have been seemed empty after the Cretaceous.  Pantadonts were a diverse order of browsing animals that thrived in the  Paleocene dying out in the Eocene.  They ranged from the size of rabbits to rhinos. Barylambda was one of the largest Paleocene mammals at around 650 kg. Its skeleton is of a cumbersome animal made for browsing by resting on its massive hind limbs and its heavy tail, which allowed to raise the front of the body and to brows the high branches. Their life style may have been like that of the extinct ground sloth.

Barylamba from the Nabisco prehistoric mammal premium made by Lido.  These figures are quite good for there time and it is still one of the the best toy figures of an early mammal.  This figure is often misidentified as a sloth or dire wolf.  It appears to be based on the Zallinger Age of Mammals mural. Diatryma and Gastornis have attracted the public but not much else from the epoch has caught on the public attention.

In the Late Paleocene and Middle Eocene the 9ft tall Diatryma and its relatives dominated North America and Europe.  They are alternately thought to have been the predators of the period or eaters of rushes and tussocks. Diatryma that used its beak to harvest foliage, fruits, and seeds from the subtropical forests that it inhabited,  They and a rare terrestrial alligator seem to the best candidates for top predator in the first Paleocene. Mammals remain small. had relatively short legs did not have long talons, but rather short toenails

Diatryma from Bullyland.  

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Diatryma was popularized by MPC series of the 60's. Photo and custom figure from Fred Hinojosa.

Giant birds are found in the Americas, Africa, Europe and Australia. Asia is isolated from the other continents and there mammal predators develop. Later the climate changes forests decline mammal predators spread and big birds die out. the bird did not have a hook on the end of its beak - a feature found in all raptors which helps them to hold prey and tear into carcasses.