Meet The Ancestor

I'm a sucker for artists' impressions of things that cannot be photographed, such as extinct animals or futuristic technology. This is Carl Buell's impression of the Earliest Placental Mammal Ancestor, which remains nameless. An international team of scientists using MorphoBank - a huge new web application for exploring the Tree of Life - traced the lineage of all placental mammals on the planet to this small, furry, shrew-like insectivore. In a mere 100 million years this little fellow evolved into 5,000 mammalian species, including whales, bats, elephants, dogs and humans (CLICK). Didn't he do well!