Habitat changes and changing predatory habits in North American fossil canids.

The spread of open grassy habitats and the evolution of long-legged herbivorous mammals with high-crowned cheek teeth have been viewed as an example of coevolution. Previous studies indicate that specialized predatory techniques in carnivores do not correlate with the spread of open habitats in North America. Here we analyse new data on elbow-joint shape for North American canids over the past ∼37 million years and show that incipiently specialized species first appeared along with the initial spread of open habitats in the late Oligocene. Elbow-joint morphologies indicative of the behavior of modern pounce-pursuit predators emerged by the late Miocene coincident with a shift in plant communities from C3 to C4 grasses. Finally, pursuit canids first emerged during the Pleistocene. Our results indicate that climate change and its impact on vegetation and habitat structure can be critical for the emergence of ecological innovations and can alter the direction of lineage evolution.

Comparative ingestive mastication in domestic horses and cattle: a pilot investigation.

It is often assumed that horses chew food more intensively during ingestion than cattle, which - as ruminants - complete part of the mastication during rumination. This has been proposed as a reason for more robust mandibles, larger masseter insertion areas and larger masseter muscles in horses as compared to cattle and other grazing ruminants. In this study, we evaluate results of comparative feeding trials with three horses (338-629 kg) and three cows (404-786 kg), on four different roughages. Ingestion time (s/g dry matter) and chewing intensity (chews/g dry matter) differed among animals within a species, indicating an influence of body mass, and differed significantly between different forages. However, although numerical differences clearly suggest that horses have longer ingestion times and higher chewing intensities on high-fibre roughage than do cattle, this could not be proven in this dataset, most likely because of the small number of individuals sampled. Further studies are required to corroborate the suspected ingestive behaviour difference between equids and ruminants.

Miocene ungulates and terrestrial primary productivity: where have all the browsers gone?

Progressive changes are observed in both the composition of mammal faunas and vegetation during the Miocene epoch [24-5 mega-annum (Ma)]. These changes are usually interpreted as a response to climatic changes. In the traditional view, forests or woodlands gradually gave way to more open habitats, with grazing (grass-eating) ungulate (hoofed) mammal species replacing the browsing (leafy-vegetation-eating) species as grasslands expanded. However, data from fossil assemblages in the Great Plains region of North America show that this faunal change was not a one-for-one replacement of browsers by grazers, as usually thought. Typical late early Miocene (17 Ma) fossil communities included extraordinarily high numbers of browsing ungulate species, comprising a fauna that cannot be directly analogized with any present-day community. Both maximum species richness of all ungulates and the proportion of browsers declined steadily in ungulate communities through the middle Miocene, to levels comparable to those of the present by the late Miocene. The resulting dramatic, cumulative loss of browsing species constitutes one of the strongest faunal signals of the late Tertiary (but was not a single "event"). We suggest that the early Miocene browser-rich communities may reflect higher levels of primary productivity in Miocene vegetation, compared with equivalent present-day vegetation types. The observed decline in species richness may represent a gradual decline in primary productivity, which would be consistent with one current hypothesis of a mid-Miocene decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentrations from higher mid-Cenozoic values.

Evolutionary and preservational constraints on origins of biologic groups: divergence times of eutherian mammals.

Some molecular clock estimates of divergence times of taxonomic groups undergoing evolutionary radiation are much older than the groups' first observed fossil record. Mathematical models of branching evolution are used to estimate the maximal rate of fossil preservation consistent with a postulated missing history, given the sum of species durations implied by early origins under a range of species origination and extinction rates. The plausibility of postulated divergence times depends on origination, extinction, and preservation rates estimated from the fossil record. For eutherian mammals, this approach suggests that it is unlikely that many modern orders arose much earlier than their oldest fossil records.

New ideas in ungulate phylogeny and evolution.

Most of the ungulates (hoofed mammals) that survive today belong to the orders Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates) or Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates), and are known for their herbivorous specializations (e.g. the ruminant type of stomach), for their large body size (e.g. hippos or rhinos) or for their fleetness of foot (e.g. antelope or horses). Yet these present-day examples represent the specialized end-points of a large Tertiary radiation of hoofed mammals. There was a bewildering variety of small generalized early Tertiary forms, even including some carnivorous taxa. In addition, some specialized island continent ungulate radiations are now either entirely extinct (the South American ungulates), or are represented by only a few living members (the African 'subungulates'). Recent fossil discoveries, and advances in phylogenetic systematics, have reopened a number of issues in ungulate classification, which have affected our views not only on ungulates themselves, but also on patterns of Tertiary biogeography and evolution.

Muscles of the masticatory apparatus in two genera of hyraces (Procavia and Heterohyrax).

Subungulate hyraces are similar to the condition assumed to have characterized primitive ungulates and subungulates by virtue of their small body size, relatively unspecialized cranial and postcranial anatomy, and primitive type of lophodont dentition. The muscles of mastication of Procavia habesssinica and Heterohyrax brucei are here compared with those of other mammals, both with ungulates, as an example of more specialized mammals, and with opossums, as an example of more generalized mammals, to determine aspects of hyrax myology that represent the retention of a condition primitive for herbivorous mammals. The masticatory muscles of hyraces retain the primitive ungulate/subungulate condition in the large, complexly subdivided temporalis, and in the enlarged, pinnated, bilayered medial pterygoid. The medial pterygoid originates from the pterygoid hamulus, a condition that may also be primitive for this assemblage. The large complex superficial masseter is derived compared with the condition in ruminant artiodactyls, but may represent the condition primitive for perissodactyls. The architectural modifications of this muscle in hyraces may represent adaptations to allow a wide gape threat display. Hyraces possess a posterior belly of the digastric alone, paralleling the condition in some perissodactyls. They possess a large and complexly subdivided styloglossus, which may be a shared derived character of subungulates. Hyraces are unique among ungulates and subungulates in the extreme reduction of the anterior hyoid cornua, and may be unique among mammals in the development of paired lingual processes from the ceratohyal ossifications.