What about the vertebrate herbivores? Well OK, again, the origin of terrestrial tetrapods lies in the early Mississippian. From the early Mississippian and all the way through the late Pennsylvanian, not one of these silly clowns figures out the plant is good to eat. It is in the late Pennsylvanian that we see the first appearance of a tetrapod herbivore - Edaphosaurus.
Edaphosaurus belongs to one of two great lineages of tetrapods , the synapsids. We are synapsids; mammals are a sub-unit group within the synapsids. The other great group of tetrapods are the reptiles. What we will now trace is the transition through time in which the first herbivores arise in the synapsid line; in the Mesozoic they are replaced by herbivores out of the reptile line, our buddies the dinosaurs. Then, with the extinction of the terrestrial dinosaurs, the dominant herbivores in the terrestrial ecosystem revert to being synapsids. One might almost predict that, after humans get through doing ourselves in by bombing ourselves out of existence or starving ourselves out of existence through overpopulation, maybe it will be something in the line of the birds that is going to come back and take over again. It would only be poetic justice.
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