EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Transformation and diversification in early mammal evolution

Zhe-Xi Luo ()
Additional contact information
Zhe-Xi Luo: Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA

Nature, 2007, vol. 450, issue 7172, 1011-1019

Abstract: The descent of mammals The evolution of mammals is often told as a linear story involving the steady acquisition of key characters developed from the ancestral reptilian state — such as a middle ear, evolved from the jaw joint, and the 'tribosphenic' (crushing and biting) molar from the simple pointed teeth of reptiles. But as Zhe-Xi Luo shows in a Review Article, a host of recently discovered fossils alters that view radically. Mammalian evolution, far from taking a direct path, is a complex branching network with a number of dead ends: mammalian features evolved repeatedly in separate lineages, and were sometimes lost.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06277 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:450:y:2007:i:7172:d:10.1038_nature06277

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

DOI: 10.1038/nature06277

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:450:y:2007:i:7172:d:10.1038_nature06277