https://newatlas.com/macrauchenia-dna-family-tree/50290/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrauchenia

What do you get when you cross an elephant, a llama, a camel, and a rhinoceros? If you have no idea, don’t feel too bad – it puzzled Charles Darwin too, when he stumbled on the fossilized bones of just such a creature in 1834. Known as Macrauchenia patachonica, the enigmatic, extinct animal has evaded classification ever since, but a new DNA study has finally found where it fits on the family tree.

The Macrauchenia was first discovered by Darwin while on a research trip in Argentina. It’s general body shape is that of a camel, but it had hooves like a rhino, a long neck like a llama and most strikingly, a short trunk like an elephant. This cobbled-together creature likely lived across South America before dying out about 10,000 years ago.

Macrauchenia is an evolutionary dead end, having no modern relatives. So the team created a new technique that compared the genomes of a range of modern animals, and using those as reference points, they were able to recover about 80 percent of the 17,000 genes that most likely made up the Macrauchenia. That allowed them to slot it into Panperissodactyla, a large group of mammals that includes horses, rhinos and tapirs.

The new study shows that the line that led to Macrauchenia separated from the lineage of the equids (the horse family) before 66 million years ago, just before the extinction of the dinosaurs.

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So the ancestor of this creature is another mammal whose ancestors survived the K-T extinction. To die out just 10,000 years ago.

mollwollfumble said:

https://newatlas.com/macrauchenia-dna-family-tree/50290/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrauchenia

What do you get when you cross an elephant, a llama, a camel, and a rhinoceros? If you have no idea, don’t feel too bad – it puzzled Charles Darwin too, when he stumbled on the fossilized bones of just such a creature in 1834. Known as Macrauchenia patachonica, the enigmatic, extinct animal has evaded classification ever since, but a new DNA study has finally found where it fits on the family tree.

The Macrauchenia was first discovered by Darwin while on a research trip in Argentina. It’s general body shape is that of a camel, but it had hooves like a rhino, a long neck like a llama and most strikingly, a short trunk like an elephant. This cobbled-together creature likely lived across South America before dying out about 10,000 years ago.

Macrauchenia is an evolutionary dead end, having no modern relatives. So the team created a new technique that compared the genomes of a range of modern animals, and using those as reference points, they were able to recover about 80 percent of the 17,000 genes that most likely made up the Macrauchenia. That allowed them to slot it into Panperissodactyla, a large group of mammals that includes horses, rhinos and tapirs.

The new study shows that the line that led to Macrauchenia separated from the lineage of the equids (the horse family) before 66 million years ago, just before the extinction of the dinosaurs.

————-

So the ancestor of this creature is another mammal whose ancestors survived the K-T extinction. To die out just 10,000 years ago.

Not everyone agrees with your assertion of the mammals that were around the time of the dinosaurs. The horses only date back to around 50 million years.

>>The evolution of the horse, a mammal of the family Equidae, occurred over a geologic time scale of 50 million years, transforming the small, dog-sized, forest-dwelling Eohippus into the modern horse. Paleozoologists have been able to piece together a more complete outline of the evolutionary lineage of the modern horse than of any other animal.

The horse belongs to the order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates), the members of which all share hooved feet and an odd number of toes on each foot, as well as mobile upper lips and a similar tooth structure. This means that horses share a common ancestry with tapirs and rhinoceroses. The perissodactyls arose in the late Paleocene, less than 10 million years after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. This group of animals appears to have been originally specialized for life in tropical forests, but whereas tapirs and, to some extent, rhinoceroses, retained their jungle specializations, modern horses are adapted to life on drier land, in the much harsher climatic conditions of the steppes. Other species of Equus are adapted to a variety of intermediate conditions.<<

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse#Before_odd-toed_ungulates

PermeateFree said:

Not everyone agrees with your assertion of the mammals that were around the time of the dinosaurs. The horses only date back to around 50 million years.

>>The evolution of the horse, a mammal of the family Equidae, occurred over a geologic time scale of 50 million years, transforming the small, dog-sized, forest-dwelling Eohippus into the modern horse. Paleozoologists have been able to piece together a more complete outline of the evolutionary lineage of the modern horse than of any other animal.

I had a chart, the most recent timeline from a research article, it should be tacked on the end of one of the Good Scientist Cartoons. Found it.

Yes, horses split from tapirs and rhinos 50 million years ago. But Macrauchenia split from the horse/tapir/rhino line (the Perissodactyla) before the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago.

>Yes, horses split from tapirs and rhinos 50 million years ago. But Macrauchenia split from the horse/tapir/rhino line (the Perissodactyla) before the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago.<

Not according to the reference I provided.

>>The horse belongs to the order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates), the members of which all share hooved feet and an odd number of toes on each foot, as well as mobile upper lips and a similar tooth structure. This means that horses share a common ancestry with tapirs and rhinoceroses. The perissodactyls arose in the late Paleocene, less than 10 million years after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.<<

I picture this when I saw the thread