Latest Mammal Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online 65 million years ago, dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops disappeared, leaving Earth open to the rise of mammals. These strange creatures are only distantly related to the mammals alive today. One of those unusual mammals, Ernanodon antelios, was only known from a single, highly distorted specimen until recently. This specimen raised more questions than it answered about habits and evolutionary relationships. In the most...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In continuing a trend that has seen scientists looking to the mechanics of nature for inspiration, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are studying the ways in which furry mammals shake themselves dry. The study — which involved 33 different animals, including 16 species and five dog breeds - found that furry mammals can shake 70 percent of the water off their bodies in just a fraction of a second. They also saw that...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Two newly discovered and ancient rodent species, including the earliest known chinchilla, may have lived in the world’s oldest grasslands about 32.5 million years ago. The discovery and subsequent analysis of the teeth by an international team of researchers, which was published in the journal American Museum Novitates, supports previously collected evidence indicating that these animals once inhabited an open and dry environment 15...

[ Watch the Video ] Scientists studying one of New Zealand’s most iconic reptiles have found that it chews its food in a way unlike any other animal on the planet, challenging the popular perception that complex chewing ability is linked to high metabolism. The tuatara, a beak-headed lizard-like reptile that is the sole living member of a family of reptiles that was widespread during the age of the dinosaurs, is able to slice through its food like a “steak knife” would. Scientists...

A new study led by Carrie Schloss, an analyst in environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington, finds that nine percent of the Western Hemisphere's mammals, and nearly forty percent in particular regions, will fall victim to the changing climate. Some mammals are merely too slow to escape climate change in their natural habitats and are unable to move into different areas. The study seeks to understand if the mammals can actually adapt to these conditions by moving or not....

An analysis of skeletal remains has provided new evidence that humans made it to the Western Hemisphere during the last ice age, where they lived alongside giant, now-extinct mammals, claims a new study published online Thursday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. University of Florida researchers used rare earth element analysis in order to measure the concentration of naturally occurring metals absorbed during fossilization in human and mammal remains discovered in south Florida...

Image Credit: Photos.com ___ Maximum running speed is the most important variable influencing mammalian eye size other than body size, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin. Species with larger eyes usually have higher visual acuity, says Chris Kirk, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. But what are the ecological factors that cause some mammals to develop larger eyes than others? "If you can think of mammals that are fast like a cheetah...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that mice and rats have evolved to gnaw with their front teeth and chew with their back teeth more successfully than rodents that 'specialize' in one or other of these biting mechanisms. Researchers designed a computer model to simulate the bite of rats to understand whether their skull shape or muscle arrangement was a major factor in their evolutionary success and global dominance, making them one of the most common pest species in the...

ICP researchers published today in the 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B' one of the first fossil-based evidences supporting the evolutionary theory of ageing, which predicts that species evolving in low mortality and resource-limited ecosystems tend to be more long-lived. The study shows that the tooth height of endemic insular mammals is an indicator of longevity, and questions the use of this morphological characteristic as an exclusive indicator to infer the diet of fossil species,...

Lawrence LeBlond for RedOrbit.com In a first of its kind study, researchers from Vanderbilt University found that mammals’ best defense to adapting to climate change was diversity, and families with higher taxonomic diversity were better able to survive ongoing environmental changes. Larisa R. G. DeSantis, Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt, led researchers in studying how North American mammals adapted to climate change over a 56-million-year...