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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]
Plesiadapis is one of the oldest known primate-like mammal genera which existed about 58–55 million years ago in North America and Europe. [2] [3] Plesiadapis means "near-Adapis", which is a reference to the adapiform primate of the Eocene period, Adapis.
Ceratopsian dinosaurs appear in the fossil record and the oldest known eutherian mammal: Juramaia. 160 Ma Multituberculate mammals (genus Rugosodon) appear in eastern China. 155 Ma First blood-sucking insects (ceratopogonids), rudist bivalves, and cheilostome bryozoans.
“For over 100 million years when dinosaurs were the dominant predators, mammals were generally small, nocturnal, and short-lived.” The pressure to stay alive eliminated the genes needed for ...
The Mesozoic era followed and the dinosaurs began their rise to dominance, spreading into the country before Pangaea split up. During the latter Jurassic Morrison Formation dinosaurs lived in the western states. During the Cretaceous, the Gulf of Mexico expanded until it split North America in half. Plesiosaurs and mosasaurs swam in its waters.
Like the strepsirrhine adapiforms, omomyids were diverse and ranged throughout Eurasia and North America. The phylogeny of omomyids, tarsiers, and simians is currently unknown. For many years, it was assumed that primates had first evolved in Africa, and this assumption and the excavations that resulted from it yielded many early simian fossils ...
Creodonta ("meat teeth") is a former order of extinct carnivorous placental mammals that lived from the early Paleocene to the late Miocene epochs in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Originally thought to be a single group of animals ancestral to the modern Carnivora , this order is now usually considered a polyphyletic assemblage of two ...
Miacidae ("small points") is a former paraphyletic family of extinct primitive placental mammals that lived in North America, Europe and Asia during the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, about 65–33.9 million years ago.