Publication Date:
2002-03-16
Description:
A profound faunal reorganization occurred near the Paleocene/Eocene boundary, when several groups of mammals abruptly appeared on the Holarctic continents. To test the hypothesis that this event featured the dispersal of groups from Asia to North America and Europe, we used isotope stratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy, and quantitative biochronology to constrain the relative age of important Asian faunas. The extinct family Hyaenodontidae appeared in Asia before it did so in North America, and the modern orders Primates, Artiodactyla, and Perissodactyla first appeared in Asia at or before the Paleocene/Eocene boundary. These results are consistent with Asia being a center for early mammalian origination.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Bowen, Gabriel J -- Clyde, William C -- Koch, Paul L -- Ting, Suyin -- Alroy, John -- Tsubamoto, Takehisa -- Wang, Yuanqing -- Wang, Yuan -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2002 Mar 15;295(5562):2062-5.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. gbowen@es.ucsc.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11896275" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Artiodactyla
;
Asia
;
Carbon Isotopes
;
China
;
Climate
;
Europe
;
Fossils
;
Geologic Sediments
;
*Mammals
;
North America
;
*Paleontology
;
Perissodactyla
;
Phylogeny
;
Primates
;
Time
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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