Pioneering discovery of an odor-detecting receptor enhancer

Each odor-detecting neuron (referred to as olfactory sensory neuron from here on), chooses a single odorant receptor gene from a fairly large number of options that are split into class I (fish-like) and class II (terrestrial-specific) ...

Grasses, mammals, and their co-evolution

After millions of years of amphibians, dinosaurs, and early mammals ruling the forests and swamps of the hot, humid Mesozoic and early Cenozoic, a new habitat emerged. Small patches of grasslands sprang up and spread as the ...

Mesozoic mammals—what do we know from China?

The most exciting findings covering Mesozoic mammals over the last two decades have come from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of China. Remarkably preserved fossils across nearly all major groups of Mesozoic mammals have ...

Brain folding

The neocortex is the part of the brain that enables us to speak, dream, or think. The underlying mechanism that led to the expansion of this brain region during evolution, however, is not yet understood. A research team headed ...

Early mammal varieties declined as flowering plants radiated

The dramatic explosion of flowering plant species that occurred about 100 million years ago was thought to have been good news for evolving mammals, providing them with new options for food and habitat. But research by geologists ...

The co-evolution of plants and mammals examined

A report at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Raleigh, North Carolina, explores the idea that the evolution of flowering plants (angiosperms) during the Cretaceous Period had a profound ...

Small winners in the mammalian race to evolve

It takes at least 10 times as many generations for a mouse to reach elephantine proportions as for the reverse transition, reveals a vast study of mammalian evolution over the past 70 million years.

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