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Most mammals develop similarly to humans; during the earliest stages of development, the embryo is largely indistinguishable from another mammal. However, there are phenomena found in human beings not found in all other mammals, as well as phenomena occurring in other mammals, but not in humans.
In mammals, the term refers chiefly to the early stages of prenatal development, whereas the terms fetus and fetal development describe later stages. [2] [4] The main stages of animal embryonic development are as follows: The zygote undergoes a series of cell divisions (called cleavage) to form a structure called a morula.
In mammals, pregnancy is the period of reproduction during which a female carries one or more live offspring from implantation in the uterus through gestation. It begins when a fertilized zygote implants in the female's uterus , and ends once it leaves the uterus.
The monotremes branched early from other mammals and do not have the teats seen in most mammals, but they do have mammary glands. The young lick the milk from a mammary patch on the mother's belly. Viviparous mammals are in the subclass Theria; those living today are in the Marsupialia and Placentalia infraclasses.
Human embryology is the study of this development during the first eight weeks after fertilization. The normal period of gestation (pregnancy) is about nine months or 36 weeks. The germinal stage refers to the time from fertilization through the development of the early embryo until implantation is completed in the uterus .
The stages are delineated through the development of structures, not by size or the number of days of development, and so the chronology can vary between species, and to a certain extent between embryos. In the human being, only the first 60 days of development are covered; at that point, the term embryo is usually replaced with the term fetus.
The obstetrical dilemma is a hypothesis to explain why humans often require assistance from other humans during childbirth to avoid complications, whereas most non-human primates give birth unassisted with relatively little difficulty. This occurs due to the tight fit of the fetal head to the maternal birth canal, which is additionally ...
Figure 1:In mammals, the quadrate and articular bones are small and part of the middle ear; the lower jaw consists only of dentary bone.. While living mammal species can be identified by the presence of milk-producing mammary glands in the females, other features are required when classifying fossils, because mammary glands and other soft-tissue features are not visible in fossils.