What are similar adaptations between Australian herbivorous marsupials and placental mammals? What are some adaptations that animals have that plants do not have? What is an ancestral characteristic for all placental mammals? a. having a tail b. walking on four legs c. giving birth to live young...
This week we conducted wallaby leg dissections for a study of the kneecaps of marsupials (pouched mammals). Placental (non-pouched) mammals like us almost all have bony kneecaps but many marsupials do not. Kneecaps do important things, acting like gears around the knee joints (e.g.this ...
or marsupial wolf, but that unfortunately became extinct before its behavior could be properly studied; it may possibly have hunted in small social groups, but biomechanical examination leads to the conclusion that, like extant carnivorous marsupials, it mainly ate prey much smaller than itself (Atta...
Evolutionarily, brown adipocytes appear in eutherian (placental) mammals; all other vertebrates, including marsupials and monotremes, possess only white fat (Hayward and Lisson, 1992). Interestingly, “protoendothermic” mammals, which have body temperatures that track with ambient temperature, also have...
Golden eagles have a more varied diet, including small mammals like rabbits, squirrels, and prairie dogs. A plump vulture makes a tempting meal. Eagles may kill adult vultures as well as raid their unattended nests to eat eggs and vulnerable chicks. This prevents future competition for food sou...
So what do eutharia have concerning flight that marsupials don't? Why aren't there monotremes adapted for flight? There are probably a lot of answers to the question of how mammals evolved viviparity. Climate is probably only one factor out of many, if it is a factor. However, the ...
But marsupials are not, as had been suggested before, inferior to placentals in some basic way such as running ability. Above, Garland and Janis 1993 (link to pdf here) examined how the ratio of metatarsal (“sole bones” of the lower end of the leg/foot) vs. femur (thigh bone) ...
like extant carnivorous marsupials, it mainly ate prey much smaller than itself (Attard, Chamoli, Ferrara, Rogers, & Wroe,2011; Figueirido & Janis,2011). Among other mammalian orders, the obvious examples of social cursorial hunters are some of the toothed whales, with the bottlenose dolphins ...
(5) Hey did you ever think about how bone shape differs between hopping marsupials (macropods) and galloping artiodactyl (even-toed) mammals? We did, in long-the-making work from an old BBSRC grant with Michael Doube et al., and one cool thing is that they mostly don’t change shape...