User:Nwbeeson/Characteristics of Mammals

The Characteristics of Mammals are those features of anatomy shared by all members of the clade Mammalia. The living Mammals are a monophyletic clade of animals, descended from one ancestral species. Using these characters, biologists have for centuries, correctly assigned living animal spieces to the Mammalia, and excluded others. There are two lists of characters: a list of hard parts, accessible to paleontologists in fossils; and a list of soft parts tissues, inaccessible in fossils, but accessible to mammologists from current specimens.

Distinguishing features
Living mammal species can be identified by the presence of sweat glands, including those that are specialized to produce milk to nourish their young. In classifying fossils, however, other features must be used, since soft tissue glands and many other features are not visible in fossils.

Many traits shared by all living mammals appeared among the earliest members of the group:


 * Jaw joint - The dentary (the lower jaw bone which carries the teeth) and the squamosal (a small cranial bone) meet to form the joint. In most gnathostomes, including early therapsids, the joint consists of the articular (a small bone at the back of the lower jaw) and the quadrate (a small bone at the back of the upper jaw).
 * Middle ear - In crown-group mammals, sound is carried from the eardrum by a chain of three bones, the malleus, the incus, and the stapes. Ancestrally, the malleus and the incus are derived from the articular and the quadrate bones that constituted the jaw joint of early therapsids.
 * Tooth replacement - Teeth are replaced once or (as in toothed whales and murid rodents) not at all, rather than being replaced continually throughout life.
 * Prismatic enamel - The enamel coating on the surface of a tooth consists of prisms, solid, rod-like structures extending from the dentin to the tooth's surface.
 * Occipital condyles - Two knobs at the base of the skull fit into the topmost neck vertebra; most tetrapods, in contrast, have only one such knob.