A hop from South America - tracking Australian marsupials
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 06:14
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Debates have raged for decades about how to arrange the Australian and South American branches of the marsupial family tree. While marsupials like the Australian tammar wallaby and the South American opossum seem to be quite different, research by Maria Nilsson and colleagues at the University of Muenster, soon to be published in the online open access journal PLoS Biology, shows otherwise. Using sequences of a kind of 'jumping gene,' the team has reconstructed the marsupial family to reveal that all living Australian marsupials have one ancient origin in South America. This required a simple migration scenario whereby theoretically only one group of ancestral South American marsupials migrated across Antarctica to Australia...