The three Land Rovers pause while John Flynn consults the device in his hand. ?Is the GPS happy?? someone asks him. Flynn concludes that it is, and the caravan continues slowly through the bush, negotiating trails usually traversed by oxcart. We have been driving since seven this morning, when we left Madagascar?s capital city, Antananarivo. Now, with the afternoon?s azure sky melting into pink and mauve, the group is anxious to locate a suitable campsite. A small cluster of thatched huts comes into view, and Flynn sends an ambassador party on foot to ask the inhabitants whether we may camp in the area. By the time we reach the nearby clearing, the day?s last light has disappeared and we pitch our tents in the dark. Tomorrow the real work begins.
The expedition team of seven Malagasies and six Americans, led by paleontologists Flynn and Andr? Wyss of the Field Museum in Chicago and the University of California at Santa Barbara, respectively, has come to this remote part of northwestern Madagascar in search of fossils belonging to early mammals. Previous prospecting in the region had revealed red and buff-colored sediments dating back to the Jurassic period?the ancient span of time (roughly 205 million to 144 million years ago) during which mammals made their debut. Among the fossils unearthed was a tiny jaw fragment with big implications.
Conventional wisdom holds that the precursors of modern placental and marsupial mammals arose toward the end of the Jurassic in the Northern Hemisphere, based on the ages and locations of the earliest remains of these shrewlike creatures, which are characterized by so-called tribosphenic molars. But the Malagasy jaw, which Flynn and Wyss have attributed to a new genus and species, Ambondro mahabo, possesses tribosphenic teeth and dates back some 167 million years to the Middle Jurassic. As such, their fossil suggests that tribosphenic mammals arose at least 25 million years earlier than previously thought and possibly in the south rather than the north.
Image: John J. Flynn and Susan Magallon The Field Museum
JAW FRAGMENT belonging to a mammal dubbed Ambondro mahabo was discovered by the team during a previous expedition. Less than four millimeters long, the 167 million-year-old jaw bears so-called tribosphenic teeth, suggesting that tribosphenic mammals?the precursors of today's placental and marsupial mammals?arose at least 25 million years earlier than previously thought and possibly in the south rather than the north.
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No one has disputed the age of A. mahabo, but not everyone agrees that the finding indicates that tribosphenic mammals originated in the south. Fossil-mammal expert Zhexi Luo of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and several of his colleagues recently suggested that A. mahabo and a similarly surprising fossil beast from Australia named Ausktribosphenos nyktos might instead represent a second line of tribosphenic mammals?one that gave rise to the egg-laying monotremes. But Flynn and Wyss counter that some of the features that those researchers use to link the Southern tribosphenic mammals to monotremes may be primitive resemblances and therefore not indicative of an especially close evolutionary relationship.
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