A Cretaceous symmetrodont therian with some monotreme-like postcranial features

Gang Li and Zhe-Xi Luo ()
Additional contact information
Gang Li: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Zhe-Xi Luo: Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Nature, 2006, vol. 439, issue 7073, 195-200

Abstract: Early mammals regroup The Yixian Formation in China has yielded some of the most important mammalian fossils of the past decade — notably a series of feathered dinosaurs — and continues to produce fossils that challenge conventional wisdom about the evolution of early mammals. The latest is a well preserved ‘spalacotheroid symmetrodont’, a relative of the modern therians (the marsupials and placentals). Parts of its skeleton are very un-therian like: from lumbar vertebrae down to the ankle, this mammal is very like the platypus, perhaps as a result of functional convergence. This new fossil is also of interest from the palaeobiogeography perspective. Like many other mammals in the Early Cretaceous, spalacotheroids seem to have evolved initially in Eurasia and then to have dispersed to North America.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04168 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:439:y:2006:i:7073:d:10.1038_nature04168

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature04168

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().