Mammals, including humans, stand out with their distinctively upright posture, a key trait that fueled their spectacular evolutionary success. Yet, the earliest known ancestors of modern mammals more ...

The evolutionary success of the first large predators on land was driven by their need to improve as killers, researchers suggest. The evolutionary success of the first large predators on land was ...

Over 300 million years ago, our ancestors diverged from the ancestors of reptiles and began the evolutionary journey towards becoming mammals. What were these earliest ancestors like? For one, they ...

The backbone is the Swiss Army Knife of mammal locomotion. It can function in all sorts of ways that allows living mammals to have remarkable diversity in their movements. They can run, swim, climb ...

Because nonmammalian synapsids, the extinct forerunners to mammals, had similar traits to living reptiles (like having their limbs splayed out to the side instead of tucked into their body like ...

Reconstruction of the appearance in life of a gorgonopsian in a floodplain of the Permian of Mallorca (Henry Sutherland Sharpe via Courthouse News) (CN) — Mallorca in Spain’s Balearic Islands is well ...

Mammals were long thought to have evolved nocturnal lifestyles as a way to co-exist with dinosaurs, but new research finds that nighttime behavior may have evolved 100 million years earlier than ...

Mammals are the only living members of the larger clade Synapsida, which has a fossil record spanning 320 Ma. Despite the fact that much of the ecological diversity of mammals has been considered in ...

Sketch of a gorgonopsian head, in side view. (CCA 3.0 / Dmitry Bogdanov via UW) A weird type of benign tumor has been discovered in an unlikely place: the fossilized jaw of a distant ancestor of ...

From saber-toothed synapsids to global collapse, the forgotten predators of the Permian ruled a world on the brink of ...

Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009) *[In other words, all living mammals shared a common ...