Placental mammals (infraclass Placentalia plæsənˈteɪliə) are one of the three extant subdivisions of the class Mammalia, the other two being Monotremata and Marsupialia. Placentalia contains the vast majority of extant mammals, which are partly distinguished from monotremes and marsupials in that the fetus is carried in the uterus of its mother to a relatively late stage of development. The name is something of a misnomer considering that marsupials also nourish their fetuses via a placenta, though for a relatively briefer period, giving birth to less developed young which are then nurtured for a period inside the mother's pouch.
Placental mammals are anatomically distinguished from other mammals by:
a sufficiently wide opening at the bottom of the pelvis to allow the birth of a large baby relative to the size of the mother.
the absence of epipubic bones extending forward from the pelvis, which are found in all other mammals. (Their function in non-placental mammals is to stiffen the body during locomotion, but in placentals they would inhibit the expansion of the abdomen during pregnancy.)
the rearmost bones of the foot fit into a socket formed by the ends of the tibia and fibula, forming a complete mortise and tenon upper ankle joint.
the presence of a malleolus at the bottom of the fibula.
Analysis of retroposon presence/absence patterns has provided a rapid, unequivocal means for revealing the evolutionary history of organisms: this has resulted in a revision in the classification of placentals. There are now thought to be three major subdivisions or lineages of placental mammals: Boreoeutheria, Xenarthra, and Afrotheria, all of which diverged from common ancestors.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Rodents (from Latin rodere, 'to gnaw') are mammals of the order Rodentia (rouˈdEnS@), which are characterized by a single pair of continuously growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws. About 40% of all mammal species are rodents. They are native to all major land masses except for New Zealand, Antarctica, and several oceanic islands, though they have subsequently been introduced to most of these land masses by human activity.
The Great American Biotic Interchange (commonly abbreviated as GABI), also known as the Great American Interchange and the Great American Faunal Interchange, was an important late Cenozoic paleozoogeographic biotic interchange event in which land and freshwater fauna migrated from North America via Central America to South America and vice versa, as the volcanic Isthmus of Panama rose up from the sea floor and bridged the formerly separated continents. Although earlier dispersals had occurred, probably over water, the migration accelerated dramatically about 2.
Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last common ancestor of those groups. The cladistic term for the same phenomenon is homoplasy. The recurrent evolution of flight is a classic example, as flying insects, birds, pterosaurs, and bats have independently evolved the useful capacity of flight.
Explores methods for information extraction, including traditional and embedding-based approaches, supervised learning, distant supervision, and taxonomy induction.
X chromosome inactivation (XCI) is an essential process, yet it initiates with remarkable diversity in various mammalian species. XIST, the main trigger of XCI, is controlled in the mouse by an interplay of lncRNA genes (LRGs), some of which evolved concom ...
Many of the hundreds of KRAB zinc finger proteins encoded by human and mouse are involved in taming the transcriptional regulatory potential of transposable elements. Reporting recently in Science, Yang et al. (2017) reveal that one murine family member, Z ...
2017
, , , , ,
In animal embryos, transcription is mostly silent for several cell divisions, until the release of the first major wave of embryonic transcripts through so-called zygotic genome activation (ZGA). Maternally provided ZGA-triggering factors have been identif ...