Mammals are an incredibly successful and diverse class of an

Mammals are an incredibly successful and diverse class of animals. Consider a family of mammals that you find interesting. Explain why they are interesting to you, considering their unique traits and roles in biological diversity.

Solution

One of the interesting class of mammals are Marsupials which are thought to be a pouched mammal. They give birth but they do not have gestation periods like other mammals instead, they give birth early and carry the young animal in the pouch near the abdomen in which the nourishment for the newborn is received.

In South America and Australia, marsupials are the important group of mammals, however, they began to go extinct in South America in the late Miocene and early Pliocene when land connection with North America formed allowing placental mammals to cross into South America. In Australia, they continue to be diverse and dominant native mammals. Marsupials today don\'t have as many species as do the placental mammals but they are quite structurally diverse.

Marsupials are good examples for the convergent evolution between marsupials and placental mammals in which two animals have evolved to fill the same ecological habitat in different parts of the world.