Sentences with phrase «modern mammals once»

These adaptations may have played an important role in the later success of modern mammals once the dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago, says Richard Cifelli, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who was not involved with the work.

Not exact matches

To that end, new evidence supports a theory that some experts once considered unlikely: namely, that the forerunners of Madagascar's modern mammals reached the island millions of years ago by drifting from the African mainland across the Mozambique Channel on giant rafts of vegetation ripped from the shore and launched out to sea by violent storms.

In a paper published in the journal Systematic Biology and delivered at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution Conference this week, Dr Phillips said biases in models of DNA evolution inflated estimates of when modern mammals, which were once no larger than a guinea pig, diversified and evolved into the animals familiar to us today.

Once thought to be a «killer walrus» that ate marine mammals, new tooth enamel research is bolstering the case that it likely had a diet similar modern New Zealand fur seals and sea lions.

In this first example of that phenomenon in birds and nematodes, we learned that a class of parasites that is a present - day scourge once switched hosts from birds to mammals — a process that is all too familiar to modern epidemiologists.