"It's been a complete upheaval, says Mark Springer, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Riverside. "We've come up with a very different family tree for mammals." Many ...

"This is unusual and tells us a lot about how mammals' evolution took place.” Small mammals living today have much shorter lifespans, some surviving for as little as 12 months, and maturing ...

Finally, birds and mammals belong to a richly branching part of the vertebrate phylogenetic tree, most of the branches ... given to outstanding novelties in evolution which have originated ...

To study mammal evolution and reproductive life history ... size of as many species as possible across the mammalian family tree and then use mathematical algorithms to look for patterns.