An extremely well-preserved rodentlike fossil recently discovered in China provides some of the best evidence yet for how the earliest human ancestors lived.
Named Megaconus mammaliaformis, the animal closely resembled but predated true mammals, living about 165 million years ago in a humid world dominated by early dinosaurs. It is one of two recently described ancestral mammal fossils that provide a significant leap forward for research in early mammal evolution.
Until now, most knowledge of M. mammaliaformis has been based on isolated teeth remains that suggested that the animals were not highly evolved. But the newly discovered intact skeleton — complete with some of the earliest evidence of hair — shows that these animals were more complex than previously thought, the team will report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
"Research always assumed that these were primitive and not highly specialized, but this animal shows that they were already highly specialized and highly adapted to special feeding strategies," said Thomas Martin, a paleontologist at the University of Bonn in Germany and one of the authors of the paper.
Hair impressions
By closely examining the orientation of the animal's relatively flat teeth in relation to its jaw, the team determined that M.mammaliaformis evolved to grind plants, making it one of the earliest plant eaters in a world dominated by carnivores.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!