McKenna and Sears. 2011. Limb specialization in living marsupial and eutherian mammals: constraint on limb evolution. Journal of Mammalogy 92: 1038-1049. (http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1644/10-MAMM-A-425.1)
McKenna and Sears (2011) use morphometric analyses to test the hypothesis that marsupials are limited in their degree of limb specialization compared to Eutherians. They found that marsupials have less specialized forelimbs but more specialized hindlimbs and suppose that the forelimbs are limited by the juvenile's need to crawl to the teat during development.
No comments:
Post a Comment