Common TreeshrewWIKIMEDIA, STAVENNA small land creature that lived after the supercontinent of Gondwana split is the common ancestor of all placental mammals, offering new insights on the branches of the evolutionary tree. The study was published last week (February 8) in Science.
“The data matrix that they've assembled is jaw-dropping,” Olaf Bininda-Emonds, an evolutionary biologist at Oldenburg University who was not involved in the study, told Nature.
The researchers took 6 years to look at more than 4,500 anatomical traits of 86 extinct and living mammals from museums and research institutions in the United States and Canada. The trait analysis was combined with genetic and molecular data from living species to redraw parts of the evolutionary tree.
They found that a small, furry, insectivorous mammal was the common ancestor of all placental mammals, including humans. Fossil evidence suggested that the group to which this animal belonged was the first of an explosion of placental species more than 65 million years ago.
The study also found that elephants ...
