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Today, there are only five surviving species of monotremes which live in Australia and New Guinea, consisting of the platypus and four species of echidna. Fossils of yinotheres have been found in Britain, China, Russia, Madagascar and Argentina. Contrary to other known crown mammals, they retained postdentary bones as shown by the presence of a ...
In 2024, Late Cretaceous -aged fossil specimens of actual early platypus relatives were recovered from the same rocks as Steropodon, including the basal Opalios and the more derived Dharragarra, the latter of which may be the oldest member of the platypus stem-lineage, as it retains the same dental formula found in Cenozoic platypus relatives ...
The male echidna's penis is 7 centimetres (2.8 in) long when erect, and its shaft is covered with penile spines. [29] These may be used to induce ovulation in the female. [30] It is a challenge to study the echidna in its natural habitat, and they show no interest in mating while in captivity. Prior to 2007, no one had ever seen an echidna ...
“And it represents an entire ecology of the ocean 9 millions of years ago.” The fossils were first uncovered during the school’s modernization project, which began in 2022.
It has been theorized that the loss of teeth in the platypus was a geologically recent event, occurring only in the Pleistocene (after over 95 million years of tooth presence in the ornithorhynchid lineage) after the migration of the rakali (Hydromys chrysogaster), a large semiaquatic rodent, to Australia. Competition between the rakali and ...
The earliest fossils of the short-beaked echidna date back around 15 million years ago to the Miocene epoch, and the oldest specimens were found in caves in South Australia, often with fossils of the long-beaked echidna from the same period. The ancient short-beaked echidnas are considered to be identical to their contemporary descendants ...
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These include the four species of anteater, more than a dozen armadillos, eight species of pangolin (plus fossil species), eight species of the monotreme (egg-laying mammals) echidna (plus fossil species), the Fruitafossor of the Late Jurassic, the marsupial numbat, the African aardvark, the aardwolf, and possibly also the sloth bear of South ...