Fossil discoveries provide valuable insights into extinct species, revealing their behaviors, environments, and relationships to modern animals. One such mystery surrounded Mixodectes pungens, a small ...

Newly analyzed fossil skeleton of Mixodectes pungens reveals its tree-dwelling lifestyle, dietary habits, and ties to ...

CREDIT: Chester et al. 2025 “This fossil skeleton provides new evidence concerning how placental mammals diversified ecologically following the extinction of the dinosaurs,” study co-author ...

Australia and South America were isolated from other continents during much of the Tertiary, and marsupial mammals thrived and diversified there, while placental mammals took over similar roles on ...

A mammal is an animal that feeds its young milk. The ones that give birth to well-developed babies are called placental mammals. We are placental mammals and so are dogs, cows and whales.

The marsupials have a yolk sac placenta (the initial stage in the development of the placenta in placental mammals. In placental mammals, the chorion and the allantois together form the fetal side of ...

Marsupials have split from placental mammals about 120–180 million years ago. If marsupials had functional brown fat and its thermogenic protein, it would suggest that the organ existed before ...

By contrast, strepsirrhine primates tend to have brain sizes that are essentially "average" for placental mammals of comparable body mass. Strepsirrhines as a group thus exhibit a range of ...

And marsupials solve the immune problem by delivering their embryos early. Recent DNA studies suggest placental mammals began to diverge from marsupials as early as 175 million years ago.