New study led by the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum in London, and the University of York finds that horses are related to the weird group of animals that the 19 century British naturalist, Charles Darwin, has termed as "strangest animals ever discovered". One of these strange animals looks like a crossbreed of a hippo, rhino and rodent while the other is a humpless camel sporting an elephant's trunk. These animals lived from 60 million years and got extinct only 10,000 back.
Darwin collected the fossils of these animals nearly 180 years ago. The scientists were puzzled that where these animals fit on the mammal family tree as they got extinct only 10,000 years ago. Now their confusion has been solved as the new study reports horses were linked to the strange animals.
The scientists were not able to extract the DNA from the fossil because the DNA degrades in the warm and wet conditions. However the scientists found the collagen which lasts longer. Collagen is a protein found in different types of tissues. This collagen was compared with the collagen of the living and some extinct animals to put these strange animals on the mammal family tree.
Ross MacPhee, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Mammalogy and one of the author of the study said, "Fitting South American ungulates to the mammalian family tree has always been a major challenge for paleontologists, because anatomically they were these weird mosaics, exhibiting features found in a huge variety of quite unrelated species living all over the place. This is what puzzled Darwin and his collaborator Richard Owen so much in the early 19th century. With all of these conflicting signals, they couldn't say whether these ungulates were related to giant rodents, or elephants, or camels--or what have you."
Presently scientists are researching to determine where these magnificent beasts came from.
