Wildlife

INTRODUCTION TO MAMMALS OF SOUTH ASIA

Mammals are thought to have evolved from the class Reptilia particularly within the order Therapsida of the subclass Synapsida or “mammal-like reptiles” (Novak 1999). Adelobasileus cromptoni from the late Triassic of Texas about 225 million years old was said to be the earliest known mammal (Lucas and Hunt, 1990). However, with respect to several important characters, Adelobasileus shows an intermediate condition between cynodonts and mammals and its status as mammals has been doubted (Lucas and Luo 1993). The recent discovery of Hydrocodium wui provides evidence for the earliest known mammal in 195 million year old Cretaceous Chinese sediments, suggesting that the mammals evolved 45 million year earlier than previously recognized (Lou et al. 2001). The small body size of Hydracotherium also reveals that there was more evolutionary diversity among early mammals than had been previously known (Lou et al. 2001). It is also speculated that in as early as Jurassic period mammals were occupying all available ecological niches (Wyss 2001). The present day diversity in mammals is undoubtedly the result of its early radiation through adaptation for different niches. The diversification of placental mammal orders is now unambiguously dated before the K/T boundary (Murphy and O’Brien, 2001; Tavare, et al. 2002; Springer et al. 2003). During the K/T boundary there were extremely harsh environmental conditions that probably led to large scale extinctions (Officer et al. 1986). Subsequent to the K/T transition and Gondwana split up there was cosmopolitanization of mammals that resulted in a shared lineage of old world mammals distributed in Madagascar and Penninsular India (Krause, et al. 1999). There is also evidence suggesting that the Asian ancestral mammals gave rise to at least one of the group of mammals that first appeared in North America about 55 million years ago (Beard, 2002). Therefore, the Asian region has played a

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