Marsupials are found to be more evolved from the shared common ancestor with placental mammals. Credit: Benny Marty/Shutterstock
Phys.org has an interesting article about mammal evolution. A new paper in the journal Current Biology claims that marsupial mammals are more evolutionarily derived than placental mammals. This discovery is very surprising as marsupial mammals have long been thought to be an intermediate state between egg laying and placental birth.
The study, published in Current Biology, analyzed skulls during different stages of development in 22 living mammal species. Micro-CT scans of 165 specimens helped the research team reconstruct the changes of the skull for these species during this early phase.
Using this data, they estimated how the common ancestor of marsupials and placentals would have developed and compared it with both groups to see which was the most similar.
Professor Anjali Goswami, a research leader at the Museum and senior author of the study, says, "Using this big comparative data set generated from the museum's historical collections, we have been able to flip what we know about mammal evolution on its head."
