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Blobrana


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Top Bristol students probe the habits of our earliest ancestors
Two MSc Palaeobiology students in the Department of Earth Sciences have had notable successes in their work on the habits of some of the earliest mammals to have lived, some two hundred million years ago.
The pair are studying the fossilised remains of animals from the Triassic and Jurassic periods, found in ancient caves in the Bristol area, applying innovative new research techniques to find out whether these most distant of our ancestors walked like reptiles or mammals, and how they fed.

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Blobrana


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Ancient mammals
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A new University of Florida study shows mammals change their dietary niches based on climate-driven environmental changes, contradicting a common assumption that species maintain their niches despite global warming.
Led by Florida Museum of Natural History vertebrate palaeontologist Larisa DeSantis, researchers examined fossil teeth from mammals at two sites representing different climates in Florida: a glacial period about 1.9 million years ago and a warmer, interglacial period about 1.3 million years ago. The researchers found that interglacial warming resulted in dramatic changes to the diets of animal groups at both sites. The study appears in the June 3 issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

"When people are modelling future mammal distributions, theyre assuming that the niches of mammals today are going to be the same in the future. Thats a huge assumption" - Larisa DeSantis.

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Blobrana


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CU-Boulder study shows 53 million-year-old high Arctic mammals wintered in darkness
Ancestors of tapirs and ancient cousins of rhinos living above the Arctic Circle 53 million years ago endured six months of darkness each year in a far milder climate than today that featured lush, swampy forests, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Jaelyn Eberle said the study shows several varieties of prehistoric mammals as heavy as 1,000 pounds each lived on what is today Ellesmere Island near Greenland on a summer diet of flowering plants, deciduous leaves and aquatic vegetation. But in winter's twilight they apparently switched over to foods like twigs, leaf litter, evergreen needles and fungi, said Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and chief study author.

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Blobrana


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Incredible new evidence has been unearthed of giant marsupials - including a marsupial lion and rhino-size wombat - that roamed volcanic plains of Victoria more than 50,000 years ago.
A farmer near Ballarat stumbled on the footprints and fossils of the now extinct mega-marsupials in a lake that had dried out in the recent droughts.
They are believed to belong to a group of mega-marsupials including ancient kangaroos, wallabies and wombats.

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Blobrana


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Una musaraña 'gigante' vivió en la Sierra de Atapuerca hace casi un millón de años
Los análisis morfométricos y filogenéticos de los restos fósiles de mandíbulas y dientes de una musaraña encontrada en el yacimiento de Gran Dolina de Atapuerca (Burgos) confirman que se trata de una nueva especie (Dolinasorex glyphodon) no descrita hasta ahora. El animal extinto tenía dientes rojos, era de grandes dimensiones comparado con mamíferos de la misma familia, y estaba más vinculado a las musarañas asiáticas que a las europeas.

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Blobrana


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Fossil jaws from an ancient platypus found in Victoria have revealed the Australian mammal group is tens of millions of years older than previously thought.
Molecular studies had suggested that the platypus diverged from the echidna - the only other monotreme, or egg-laying mammal - somewhere between 17 and 80 million years ago.

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Blobrana


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Analysis of the 120-million-year-old fossilised remains of an ancient mammal suggest that it was the ancestor of the duckbilled platypus. The 3in-long mammal had close similarities to the modern platypus, including strong evidence that it had the distinctive duckbill and used electroreceptors to detect prey, according to research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The skull remains, found in Australia, have been judged to be 112-121 million years old. The oldest previously confirmed platypus remains were 30 million years old.

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Blobrana


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Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis
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Scientists  in South America and Antarctica have discovered fossils of previously unknown giant prehistoric animals.
Scientists searching for fossils high in the Andes mountains in Chile have unearthed the remains of a tank-like mammal related to armadillos that grazed 18 million years ago.

"It looks different than almost anything out on the landscape today. There really isn't anything that's comparable today in terms of its body form" - scientist John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The creature, Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis, was a primitive relative of a line of heavily armoured mammals that culminated in the massive, impregnable Gyptodon, a two-tonne, 3m beast covered in armoured plates and a spiky tail.

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Blobrana


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A team of Chinese and American scientists discovered a new mammal from the 165 million-year-old lakebeds of the Jurassic Period in Northern China. This new find sheds light on the earliest mammalian evolution, especially the convergent evolution of the important tribosphenic teeth among early mammals.
Mammals have very diverse teeth. Groups of mammals are distinguished by what they eat with the teeth. Giraffes and zebras are plant eaters, cats eat meat, aardvarks feed on termites, and many primates prefer fruits. Mammals have specialized feeding adaptations of a great variety, thanks to their different teeth.

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A 66-million-year-old tooth found in India has palaeontologists questioning their theories about the rise and spread of hoofed mammals.
The tooth may have belonged to one of the condylarths, according to a new study led by Guntupalli Prasad of the University of Jammu in India.
This group of primitive mammals included the ancestors of modern hoofed animals such as goats, horses, cows, sheep, and deer.

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