Illuminating the evolutionary history of Australia’s most iconic animals

该项目旨在确定大型动物历史上关键步骤的性质和时间，并测试这些步骤与主要气候和生物变化的联系。在其他大陆上，人们普遍认为大足类动物（袋鼠及其近亲）是有蹄哺乳动物的有袋类动物，但我们对环境变化如何塑造它们的进化的理解较弱。该项目将结合联合收割机古生物学，解剖学和遗传学来解决诸如祖先的macropods如何以及为什么从树上下来，进化出两足跳跃，以及袋鼠“身体计划”的上限大小等问题。这将提高我们对气候变化对有袋动物长期影响的理解，并为基于胎盘的关键进化模型提供测试。

This project aims to pinpoint the nature and timing of key steps in macropod history and to test how these link with major climatic and biotic changes. Macropods (kangaroos and relatives) are widely considered the marsupial equivalents to hoofed mammals on other continents, but we have a weaker understanding of how their evolution was shaped by environmental change. This project will combine palaeontology, anatomy and genetics to address questions such as how and why ancestral macropods descended from the trees and evolved bipedal hopping, and the upper size limits of the kangaroo “body plan”. This should improve our understanding of the long-term effects of climate change on marsupials, and provide a test of key placental-based evolutionary models.