Publication Date:
2007-11-10
Description:
The sedimentary record documenting the northward drift of India (Late Cretaceous to late Early Eocene) has recently provided important clues to the evolution, radiation, and dispersal of mammals. Here, we report a definitive Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) archaic ungulate (Kharmerungulatum vanvaleni genus et species nova) from the Deccan volcano-sedimentary sequences exposed near Kisalpuri village in Central India. This find has important implications for the origin and diversification of early ungulates and raises three possible paleobiogeographic scenarios: (i) Archaic ungulates may have been cosmopolitan in distribution. (ii) Kharmerungulatum might be an immigrant from Western Asia. (iii) Archaic ungulates may have originated in India.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Prasad, G V R -- Verma, O -- Sahni, A -- Parmar, V -- Khosla, A -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2007 Nov 9;318(5852):937.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Geology, University of Jammu, Jammu 180 006, India. guntupalli.vrprasad@gmail.com〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17991854" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Geologic Sediments
;
India
;
*Mammals/anatomy & histology/classification
;
Molar/*anatomy & histology
;
Paleodontology
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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