Study Traces Lineage of Madagascar’s Mammals
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Madagascar’s carnivorous mammals are descendants of a mongoose-like creature that floated to the island from Africa on a raft of vegetation about 21 million years ago, according to scientists from Yale University and the Field Museum in Illinois.
Researchers used DNA sequences of four genes from 20 mammal species from Madagascar, Africa and Asia to determine which are most closely related. They used fossil data from around the world to estimate when the animals diverged, according to the study published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
