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The evolution of the digestive system has formed a significant influence in mammal evolution. With the emergence of mammals, the digestive system was modified in a variety of ways depending on the animal's diet. For example, cats and most carnivores have simple large intestines, while the horse as a herbivore has a voluminous large intestine. [127]
An evolutionary tree of mammals. [3] Modern mammals (class Mammalia) are divided into Monotremes, Marsupials, and Placentals. The subclass Prototheria (Monotremes) comprises the five species of egg-laying mammals: platypus and four echidna species. The infraclasses Metatheria (Marsupials) and Eutheria (Placentals) together form the subclass ...
A tree of life, like this one from Charles Darwin's notebooks c. July 1837, implies a single common ancestor at its root (labelled "1"). A phylogenetic tree directly portrays the idea of evolution by descent from a single ancestor. [3] An early tree of life was sketched by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his Philosophie zoologique in 1809.
The indirect route of this nerve is the result of evolution of mammals from fish, which had no neck and had a relatively short nerve that innervated one gill slit and passed near the gill arch. Since then, the gill it innervated has become the larynx and the gill arch has become the dorsal aorta in mammals. [117] [118]
Eukaryogenesis, the process which created the eukaryotic cell and lineage, is a milestone in the evolution of life, since eukaryotes include all complex cells and almost all multicellular organisms. The process is widely agreed to have involved symbiogenesis , in which an archaeon and a bacterium came together to create the first eukaryotic ...
A genetic polymorphism means that different forms of particular genes, and hence of the proteins that they produce, are co-existing within a species. Selectionists claimed that such polymorphisms are maintained by balancing selection, while neutralists view the variation of a protein as a transient phase of molecular evolution. [1]
Molecular evolution describes how inherited DNA and/or RNA change over evolutionary time, and the consequences of this for proteins and other components of cells and organisms. Molecular evolution is the basis of phylogenetic approaches to describing the tree of life. Molecular evolution overlaps with population genetics, especially on shorter ...
Mosaic evolution – Evolution of characters at various rates both within and between species; Parallel evolution – Similar evolution in distinct species; Quantum evolution – Evolution where transitional forms are particularly unstable and do not last long; Recurrent evolution – The repeated evolution of a particular character