| |
Marsupial Mole Encyclopedia Articles @ NaturalResearch.org (Natural Research) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22) |
 | | The marsupial moles are rare and poorly understood burrowing mammals of the deserts of western Australia. |
 | | When Stirling (1888) initially was unable to find the epipubic bones in Marsupial Moles, speculation was rife: the Marsupial Mole was a monotreme, it was the link between monotremes and marsupials, it had it closest affinities with the (placental) golden moles, it was convergent with edentates, it was a polyprotodont diprotodont, and so on. |
 | | Molecular level analysis in the early 1980s showed that the marsupial moles are not closely related to any of the living marsupials, and that they appear to have followed a separate line of development for a very long time, at least 50 million years. |
| www.naturalresearch.org /encyclopedia/Marsupial_mole (834 words) |