The earliest known members of a group of mammals that survived for 130 million years already had the anatomical features that enabled the animals to thrive in the shadows of dinosaurs — and to survive through their mass extinction.
A nearly complete skeleton described by palaeontologists belonged to a mammal that lived about 160 million years ago in what is now northeastern China. The animal was one of the earliest of the multituberculates — rodent-like mammals known by their distinctive, many-cusped teeth hat lend the group its moniker.
During most of their 130-million-year existence — one of the longest known for any mammalian lineage — these diverse creatures were the dominant mammals and occupied many ecological niches, says Zhe-Xi Luo, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Chicago. Some multituberculates lived in trees, many were ground-dwellers and some even burrowed. “Before rodents came along, multituberculates played the same roles” that rodents would eventually claim in their ecosystems, he says.
Fossil reveals features of mammal line that outlived dinosaurs
No comments:
Post a Comment