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The Bighorn Basin warms
The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum is an abrupt global warming 56 million years ago, triggered by a rapid release of carbon into the atmosphere. The Bighorn Basin provides the most continuous land-based record of the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, and the locality is therefore widely used as an analogue in climate research: a rapid carbon release, five to eight degrees of warming, and a recovery that took some two hundred thousand years. It is also here that the first true primates and the first hoofed mammals appear in North America, almost simultaneously, as part of the same faunal turnover.
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