Sentences with phrase «nocturnal mammals»

«Not acting is not an option because the life histories of these flying, nocturnal mammals — characterized by long generation times and low reproductive rates — mean that population recovery is unlikely for decades or even centuries, if at all,» said McCracken.

Some researchers have proposed that the early, nocturnal mammals evolved larger brains to boost their hearing, because sight was less important at night.

But in the rod cells of nocturnal mammals, it's the other way round.

In humans the olfactory / memory brain of primitive nocturnal mammals has evolved into the more visual - auditory / memory brain that causes sad movies and sad songs to evoke lost loves and make us cry.

Bat biologists have previously observed the nocturnal mammals feeding on many prey species, but it's hard to measure what the bats prefer.

Not exact matches

It turns out lower mammals that are active during the day, such as ground squirrels, lack the local pupillary light reflex Yau's team found; the same applies to primates, whether nocturnal or not.

This small, hairless predatory mammal is nocturnal and hunts in packs, ambushing and devouring prey many times its size.

They found that species that have evolved noxious sprays as a defense, such as skunks, tend to be nocturnal and subject to predation by other mammals, whereas socially vigilant species, such as mongooses, tend to be diurnal and at risk of predation by birds of prey.

«Whiskers are an amazing sensory tool to have when you are nocturnal and the evolution of whiskers possibly assisted in the survival of the therapsids — and more specifically the probainognathians — which eventually evolved into mammals as we know them today,» says Benoit.

Mammals generally have rather poor color vision or even no color vision at all because they tended to be nocturnal during the early stages of their evolution.

When mammals appeared 100 million years later, they may have inherited their nocturnal ways from synapsids.

We thought the threat of predatory dinosaurs forced early mammals to become nocturnal.

Transitions from nocturnal to diurnal habits occurred many times, he says, so mammals may have become nocturnal independently.

We thought the first mammals turned nocturnal to escape dinosaur predators, but 100 million years earlier, the precursors of mammals were active at night

Fossil evidence from mammals often suggest that they were nocturnal even if they were not.

A long - standing theory holds that the common ancestor to all mammals was nocturnal, but the new discovery reveals when mammals started living in the daytime for the first time.

While dinosaurs ruled the world some 200 million years ago, a group of nocturnal, shrewlike proto - mammals unwittingly sniffed out a strategy for survival that eventually led to the evolution of larger brains.

They aligned these with the mammal family tree to find the likely activity patterns of extinct mammals: if two related mammals are nocturnal, their common ancestor probably was too.

Mammals evolved at least 160 million years ago, but most were small while dinosaurs ruled — and possibly nocturnal, only foraging at night.

That supports the «nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis»: the dinosaur extinction opened up new niches for mammals, particularly daytime foraging.

(We mammals should be glad it beat the odds: After the dinosaurs» swift exit, nocturnal furballs — our ancestors — scampered into the daylight and conquered the planet.

2012 Hall, M. I., Kamilar, J. M., & Kirk, E. C. Eye shape and the nocturnal bottleneck of mammals.

One explanation for this finding is the fact that all mammals probably share a long period of adaptation for nocturnal life deep in their evolutionary history.

Since the mammal belongs to the nocturnal group, there are higher chances of finding one in your compound during the night.

Most of the mammals are nocturnal except for the howler monkeys which are commonly seen and heard «howling» in the area around Santa Teresa.