Dichotomy of eutherian reproduction and metabolism

Metabolism and reproduction , the battle for nutrients

The origin of eutherian mammals

Palaeontologically recognizable eutherians originated no later than the Early Cretaceous in warm, probably moderately seasonal climates. Immediate ancestors were small, sharing many anatomical, physiological and reproductive features with small modern marsupials. Development of characteristically eutherian features involved interactions of body size, rates of metabolism, energetic costs of repr...

Reconstruction and evolutionary history of eutherian chromosomes.

Whole-genome assemblies of 19 placental mammals and two outgroup species were used to reconstruct the order and orientation of syntenic fragments in chromosomes of the eutherian ancestor and six other descendant ancestors leading to human. For ancestral chromosome reconstructions, we developed an algorithm (DESCHRAMBLER) that probabilistically determines the adjacencies of syntenic fragments us...

The Eutherian Pseudoautosomal Region.

The pseudoautosomal region (PAR) is a unique segment of sequence homology between differentiated sex chromosomes where recombination occurs during meiosis. Molecular and functional properties of the PAR are distinctive from the autosomes and the remaining regions of the sex chromosomes. These include a higher rate of recombination than genome average, bias towards GC-substitutions and increased...

Divergence Times of Eutherian Mammals

In the continuing debate about the timing of the origin of major extant placental clades, both proponents of a divergence after the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary and those advocating divergence deep within the Cretaceous too often miss what the Late Cretaceous record of placentals actually shows. For example, Foote et al. (1) are correct that many Late Cretaceous reports of extant ordinal ...