"Today, Australia is known as a land of marsupials, but discovering these new fossils is the first indication that Australia was previously home to a diversity of monotremes." Only five of these ...

The short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus)  is one of Australia’s most iconic animals. Belonging to a unique group of ...

that is to say that their eggs develop inside a maternal uterus, and that they give birth to small beings already formed, some of them deviate from the rule; they are called monotremes.

Specifically, the researchers knew that if they found a feature in birds that was also present in monotremes (or marsupials or eutherians), this would mean that the feature was most likely also ...

No other continent has the egg-laying monotremes and the pouched marsupials living side by side with placental mammals. Understanding how this unique collection of creatures came to be here has ...

The short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) is one of Australia's most iconic animals. Belonging to a unique group of ...

Monotremes diverged from the therian mammal lineage 166 Myr ago and developed a unique suite of characters (dark-red text). Therian mammals with common characters split into marsupials and ...

"They show the world that long before Australia became the land of pouched mammals, marsupials, this was a land of furry egg-layers - monotremes," Ms Smith says. "It seems that 100 million years ...