Thursday, June 5, 2014

Kansas fossil links prehistoric land-dwelling plant-eaters to older meat-eating ancestors

Eocasea martini extends ancestry of modern mammals back some 20 million years and links very large, plant-eating dinosaurs to small, meat-eating ancestry.

by John Tyburski
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report published earlier this week in PLoS One describes how land herbivores may have descended from older carnivorous ancestors. Professor Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada, along with his colleague, Jörg Fröbisch of the Museum für Naturkunde and Humboldt-University in Berlin, examined the 300-million-year old fossilized remains of Eocasea martini, a member of the caseid branch of the Synapsids that is thought to have fed on insects and other small animals… [Pending]

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