Sentences with phrase «of modern mammals»

Scientists say the creatures are the oldest known ancestors of modern mammals, including human beings.

They also used the conservation status of modern mammals to model diversity and body size distributions for 200 years in the future.

So it's possible that these early relatives of modern mammals evolved in cooler, upland areas and that the dinosaurs were in the hotter, lowland areas.

«Megaconus confirms that many modern mammalian biological functions related to skin and integument had already evolved before the rise of modern mammals,» said Luo, who was also part of the team that first discovered evidence of hair in pre-mammalian species in 2006 (Science, 331: 1123 - 1127, DOI: 10.1126 / science.1123026).

The site contains abundant fossils, diverse assemblages of Triassic animals including relatives of crocodylians, giant - headed amphibians and ancient relatives of modern mammals called cynodonts.

«We see the first wave of modern mammals showing up,» including ancestral primates and hoofed animals,» he adds.

«The lesions we were seeing were strikingly similar to those that we often see on the skulls of modern mammals that ram heads,» says Peterson.

Only a handful of modern mammals produce venom, including the platypus and certain species of shrews.

It also had hallmarks of modern mammals, including hair and sweat glands.

Galtier's results suggest the ancestor of modern mammals weighed at least a kilogram, and lived over 25 years».

The new species, Hadrocodium wui, had a precociously large brain and the middle ear typical of modern mammals.

Its finlike appendages are sturdy enough to support its weight, with internal bone structures recognizable as the prototypes of modern mammal limbs.

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.

In a sense, the three big branches of modern mammals are all accidental survivors among many other mammaliaform lineages that perished in extinction,» Luo added.

This reaffirms previous arguments that the explosion of modern mammal diversification did not occur in the Triassic period, but many millions of years later in the Jurassic.

It allows us to piece together poorly understood details of the critical transition of modern mammals from pre-mammalian ancestors,» said Zhe - Xi Luo, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago.

The common ancestor of modern mammals was tiny and shrewlike, living unobtrusively in the shadow of the dinosaurs — or so we thought.

«It has not completely lost this ability to sensitively detect ground vibrations through the jaw but has gained some of the modern mammal ability to hear airborne sounds,» Luo adds.

«Proportion of the ear bones [is] already like those of modern mammals [in this animal] but the reptilian connection to the jaw is retained.»

A new genetic analysis suggests that the common ancestor of modern mammals may not have been shrewlike in size, but more like a small monkey

We argue that these morphogenetic mechanisms of modern mammals were operating before the rise of modern mammals, driving the morphological disparity in the earliest mammaliaform diversification.

All these data eventually helped them conclude that dinosaurs clearly belonged to a category in - between that of modern mammals and reptiles.