Buckle up—this is close-up level insane. Feast your eyes on Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1365, captured in jaw-dropping infrared glory by the James Webb Space Telescope.This beast sits about 56 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax, stretching a colossal 200,000 light-years across—roughly twice the diameter of our own Milky Way. That glowing central bar acts like a cosmic superhighway, channeling rivers of gas and dust straight into furious star-forming nurseries while secretly feeding a ravenous supermassive black hole at the galaxy's heart. Dusty filaments twist and bubble like smoke from an otherworldly fire, creating one of the most intricate galactic portraits we've ever seen. Here's the mind-bender: the photons we're admiring right now left NGC 1365 around 56 million years ago—smack in the middle of Earth's wildest fever dream, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Our planet had turned into a steamy greenhouse—no polar ice caps, palm trees swaying where the Arctic should be, and crocodiles lounging under tropical canopies well north of the Arctic Circle. It was hot, it was humid, and it was an evolutionary pressure cooker.That global heatwave acted like a giant "GO!" button for life on Earth. Modern mammal orders exploded onto the scene or diversified dramatically: the earliest true primates (our distant ancestors), the first horses, rhinos, and even-toed hoofed animals that would eventually give us deer, cattle, pigs, and whales. Some mammals actually shrank in size to shed heat more efficiently in the scorching climate. It was the true dawn of the Age of Mammals. And that's your geology bulletin for today—cosmic fireworks meets prehistoric sauna! Have an absolutely stellar day, Earthlings! Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Janice Lee (NOIRLab) — Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)