Saturday, October 15, 2022

Mesozoic mammalian evolutionary news

I missed this one last month - the genomic common mammal.

It's only a model. The model is slanted to the marsupial-placental commons; I don't know how well it does for monotremes. There's mention of sex chromosomes which ... don't apply to the platypus.

One point that rings truer to me is how, exactly, Chicxulub forced selection upon us placentals. That it did is known - but some selection went stronger than others. The herbivores are called out, here.

I keep hearing that the horse and camel are Parias. The damage hit hardest in the North American continent. This implies that the mammals there had to adapt, hardest. The rat and the primate were both European in origin; far from the impact (although maybe not the tsunami). We were also tree-dwellers and burrowers, so could weather this storm better. (South) America's marsupials - likewise. The "Afrotheres" whose descendants are elephants - I suppose they were equatorial and noncoastal.

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