A Cretaceous Hoofed Mammal from India

Prasad, G. V. R.; Verma, Omkar; Sahni, Ashok; Parmar, Varun

doi:10.1126/science.1149267

Cited by 52 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…On the other hand, given our admittedly poor knowledge of mammalian evolution during the Cretaceous in Africa, the hypothesis of the occurrence in that continent of a Cretaceous ungulate-like LCA of afrotherians could not be rejected. Nevertheless, the worldwide earliest known putative archaic ungulates may have occurred as late as the latest Cretaceous, only ∼ 300,000 years before the K/P boundary, and their belonging to Placentalia is not ascertain [Prasad et al, 2007;Archibald et al, 2011]. As a consequence, a post-Cretaceous origin for Afrotheria fits more parsimoniously with the current fossil record and our data.…”

Section: Implications On Divergence Time Estimationsupporting

confidence: 73%

A Memory Already like an Elephant's? The Advanced Brain Morphology of the Last Common Ancestor of Afrotheria (Mammalia)

et al. 2013

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Virtually reconstructed and natural endocranial casts are used in the study of brain evolution through geological time. We here present work investigating the paleoneurological evolution of afrotherian mammals. Using microCT-generated endocasts we show that, with the exception of the subfamilies Macroscelidinae and Tenrecoidea, most Afroinsectiphilia display a more or less gyrencephalic and ventrally expanded neopallium, two derived features that are unexpected for these insectivore-grade afrotherians. This implies that the endocranial cast morphology at the root of the afrotherian clade may have been more advanced than previously thought. The reconstructed endocranial morphology of the Afrotheria's last common ancestor reaches the level of complexity of some early Cenozoic archaic ungulates. Our result gives support to the hypothesis of an ungulate-like ancestral body plan for Afrotheria. It also implies that the a priori ‘primitive' suite of traits evident in the brain of Afroinsectivora, especially in the tenrecs, may have been secondarily acquired. Implications on the overestimation of the divergence age of Afrotheria are discussed.

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Section: Implications On Divergence Time Estimationsupporting

confidence: 73%

A Memory Already like an Elephant's? The Advanced Brain Morphology of the Last Common Ancestor of Afrotheria (Mammalia)

et al. 2013

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“…Further analyses using the traditional search option and these 67 trees as starting topologies found 300 MPTs of the same length as in the initial search. Pruned taxa analysis identified Kharmerungulatum (18) and Montanalestes (29) as being particularly unstable. A posteriori deletion of these two taxa produced the reduced strict consensus tree shown in The MPTs for all three analyses (unconstrained and constrained) have very similar topologies (2,26,28).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sahnitherium is known from only a single molar and has been qualitatively compared with "zhelestids," but also shares many morphological similarities with Deccanolestes (17) (see Materials and Methods). Kharmerungulatum is also known from a single, heavily worn molar, and was described as a possible placental mammal, specifically a "condylarth" (18). D. hislopi is the only Indian Cretaceous eutherian to have been included in a few previous phylogenetic analyses, which have returned mixed results.…”

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confidence: 98%

“…The Indian subcontinent's lengthy northward migration, starting with Gondwanan breakup from the Middle Jurassic (178-161 Mya) to its collision with Asia in the Eocene (14), has fueled discussions about an Indian "Garden of Eden" for placental mammals (12). To date, five species of eutherians have been named from India's Upper Cretaceous (Maastrichtian, 70.6-65.5 Mya) intertrappean beds: D. hislopi (13), Deccanolestes robustus (15), Deccanolestes narmadensis (16), Sahnitherium rangapurensis (17), and Kharmerungulatum vanvaleni (18). Sahnitherium is known from only a single molar and has been qualitatively compared with "zhelestids," but also shares many morphological similarities with Deccanolestes (17) (see Materials and Methods).…”

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confidence: 99%

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A radiation of arboreal basal eutherian mammals beginning in the Late Cretaceous of India

Goswami

Prasad

Upchurch

et al. 2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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India's Late Cretaceous fossil mammals include the only undisputed pre-Tertiary Gondwanan eutherians, such as Deccanolestes . Recent studies have suggested a relationship between Deccanolestes and African and European Paleocene adapisoriculids, which have been variably identified as stem euarchontans, stem primates, lipotyphlan insectivores, or afrosoricids. Support for a close relationship between Deccanolestes and any of these placental mammal clades would be unique in representing a confirmed Mesozoic record of a placental mammal. However, some paleogeographic reconstructions place India at its peak isolation from all other continents during the latest Cretaceous, complicating reconstructions of the biogeographic history of the placental radiation. Recent fieldwork in India has recovered dozens of better-preserved specimens of Cretaceous eutherians, including several new species. Here, we incorporate these new specimens into an extensive phylogenetic analysis that includes every clade with a previously hypothesized relationship to Deccanolestes . Our results support a robust relationship between Deccanolestes and Paleocene adapisoriculids, but do not support a close affinity between these taxa and any placental clade, demonstrating that Deccanolestes is not a Cretaceous placental mammal and reinforcing the sizeable gap between molecular and fossil divergence time estimates for the placental mammal radiation. Instead, our expanded data push Adapisoriculidae, including Deccanolestes , into a much more basal position than in earlier analyses, strengthening hypotheses that scansoriality and arboreality were prevalent early in eutherian evolution. This comprehensive phylogeny indicates that faunal exchange occurred between India, Africa, and Europe in the Late Cretaceous-Early Paleocene, and suggests a previously unrecognized ∼30 to 45 Myr “ghost lineage” for these Gondwanan eutherians.

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“…This last model implies that Middle-and even Early Cretaceous crown placental mammals existed, but have not yet been recovered from an otherwise diverse mammalian fossil record. Palaeontological interpretations of crown placental lineages deep within the Cretaceous [9,10] have been contested on phylogenetic and anatomical grounds [11 -13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phylogenomic datasets provide both precision and accuracy in estimating the timescale of placental mammal phylogeny

et al. 2012

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The fossil record suggests a rapid radiation of placental mammals following the Cretaceous -Paleogene (K -Pg) mass extinction 65 million years ago (Ma); nevertheless, molecular time estimates, while highly variable, are generally much older. Early molecular studies suffer from inadequate dating methods, reliance on the molecular clock, and simplistic and over-confident interpretations of the fossil record. More recent studies have used Bayesian dating methods that circumvent those issues, but the use of limited data has led to large estimation uncertainties, precluding a decisive conclusion on the timing of mammalian diversifications. Here we use a powerful Bayesian method to analyse 36 nuclear genomes and 274 mitochondrial genomes (20.6 million base pairs), combined with robust but flexible fossil calibrations. Our posterior time estimates suggest that marsupials diverged from eutherians 168 -178 Ma, and crown Marsupialia diverged 64 -84 Ma. Placentalia diverged 88 -90 Ma, and present-day placental orders (except Primates and Xenarthra) originated in a $20 Myr window (45 -65 Ma) after the K -Pg extinction. Therefore we reject a pre K-Pg model of placental ordinal diversification. We suggest other infamous instances of mismatch between molecular and palaeontological divergence time estimates will be resolved with this same approach.

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A Cretaceous Hoofed Mammal from India

Cited by 52 publications

References 2 publications

A Memory Already like an Elephant's? The Advanced Brain Morphology of the Last Common Ancestor of Afrotheria (Mammalia)

A Memory Already like an Elephant's? The Advanced Brain Morphology of the Last Common Ancestor of Afrotheria (Mammalia)

A radiation of arboreal basal eutherian mammals beginning in the Late Cretaceous of India

Phylogenomic datasets provide both precision and accuracy in estimating the timescale of placental mammal phylogeny

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