Latest Synapsids Stories

A recent study by an international group of evolutionary biologists has pointed to six broad yet distinct ‘waves’ of climate-induced mammalian diversity in the last 65 million years of evolution. Researchers say that extended periods of warming and cooling appear to signal the shift from one dominant grouping of mammals to the next. In the online version of the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Professor Christine Janis of Brown University and a...

  A well-preserved fossil discovered in China provides new evidence that the split between placental mammals and marsupials may have occurred 35 million years earlier than previously believed, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The scientists, led by Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist Zhe-Xi Luo, said the discovery fills an important gap in the fossil record, and helps to calibrate modern, DNA-based methods of dating evolution. The...