In:
Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Vol. 362, No. 6410 ( 2018-10-05), p. 25-26
Abstract:
Perhaps none of Australia's remarkable endemic plants and animals are more iconic than the kangaroos and wallabies that constitute the superfamily Macropodoidea. These pouched animals share a common ancestor with all the world's mammals, but like Australia's other marsupials, they evolved in isolation from small opossum-like founders that inhabited the southern supercontinent of Gondwana in the late Mesozoic [100 to 66 million years (Ma) ago] ( 1 ). The evolution of these iconic Australian groups (or clades) offers comparative opportunities for understanding how global-scale processes like climate change interact with the exceedingly contingent processes of evolution, adaptation, and extinction. On page 72 of this issue, Couzens and Prideaux ( 2 ) show that dental evolution in kangaroos responded to global aridification much like it did in other mammalian herbivores around the world, but that in Australia, tooth specialization was linked to a late spread of grasslands that postdated the onset of drier habitats.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0036-8075
,
1095-9203
DOI:
10.1126/science.aav1602
Language:
English
Publisher:
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Publication Date:
2018
detail.hit.zdb_id:
128410-1
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2066996-3
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2060783-0
SSG:
11
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