Gobi Desert Fossil Rewrites Mammal Family Tree and Zhelestid Taxonomy
A rabbit-shaped fossil discovered in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert has settled a long-running scientific argument regarding zhelestids, an extinct group of mammals whose classification has puzzled paleontologists for decades. For most of the last 40 years, researchers had to rely exclusively on scattered teeth and broken jaw pieces to study the group. Those rounded teeth consistently … Read more