This is a post in a series designed to keep my readers happy while I swan around New Zealand for two weeks. The theme is extinct New Zealand animals, of which there are a lot of. Note – I take full responsibility for the terrible puns that make up each post title.
This post will be mysterious… as it will reveal that New Zealand make not have been as mammal-less as previously thought. Of course, mammals exist in the present day on New Zealand in the form of domestic animals (cats, cattle, dogs, sheep etc.) and invasive pests (Australian possums and rats etc.), but there exist no modern mammals that are natives. It had been thought for years that New Zealand had never had any native mammals at any time – fossils has never been found, and there were certainly no living relatives.
However, a discovery in St. Bathans, a New Zealand town, in 2006 of mammalian fossils turned this thinking on its head.
Mammalia, as a taxonomic class, is divided into three subclasses – Theria, Prototheria and Allotheria. Placental and marsupial mammals are therian, monotremes are prototherian, and various mesozoic mammals that have no extant relatives were allotherian. These new fossils appeared to be in none of these subclasses, and looked to be a distinct lineage from any of them.
This was, and is, exciting news, as it opens up a new outlook on New Zealand’s past ecosystems. However, these nontherian mammals were only the size of a modern mouse, so it was unlikely that they posed any large predation threat to any of the flightless bird species that were evolving throughout New Zealand’s diversification period.
You can learn more about this fossil in the PNAS paper that is freely available online – “Miocene mammal reveals a Mesozoic ghost lineage on insular New Zealand, southwest Pacific”
So what’s the message that the extinction of this nontherian mammal lineage should send to the Intelligent Designer (© The Discovery Institute)? Stop tempting us humans with random fossils that don’t fit within the current evolutionary framework that we’re aware of! You’re acting as if you want us to know you exist, but only with one data point that can be easily explained through the hypothesis that this was a separate nontherian mammal linage! Gosh.
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