Archive for August 17th, 2013

Fossil of History’s Most Successful Mammal: Prehistoric ‘Rodent’ May Have Set the Stage for Life in Trees, Herbivorous Diets

The 160 million-year-old fossil of an extinct rodent-like creature from China is helping to explain how multituberculates — the most evolutionarily successful and long-lived mammalian lineage in the fossil record — achieved their dominance. This fossil find — the oldest ancestor in the multituberculate family tree — represents a newly discovered species known as Rugosodon […]