For those of us who do not live Down Under, when we think of Australia we’re probably pretty likely to conjure up images of the iconic wildlife so closely associated with it and with nowhere else on Earth. But the kangaroo and the koala, as well as the wombat, the opossum and all marsupials, trace their evolution to the Americas.
New findings from the world of evolutionary biology has upended the conventional wisdom holding that the marsupial originated in what is now Australia, making their way across other parts of the world tens of millions of years ago before the now separated continents had completely broken apart.
But as BBC reports, a team of researchers at Germany‘s University of Muenster has pieced together a family tree of sorts of the subclass of mammals using DNA analysis. And according to their conclusions, all modern marsupials trace their origins to a single opossum-like species in what is now South America before migration into other parts and evolution into different species took place.
The research and the surprising conclusions drawn from it are currently published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology journal. BBC notes that the oldest known example from the fossil record of modern marsupial precursors actually dates even farther back in time to 125 million years ago and was found in China. The Muenster team believes that this family of creature likely made their way into what we now call South America across the super-continent Gondwana. Once in Australia, marsupials continued their northward trek into Indonesia, coming very close, the BBC points out, to completing their wide circular journey back to where they started in China.
Photo by Rileypie via Wikimedia Commons.