Africa runs its own experiment
An isolated Africa produces elephants, sea cows, hyraxes, aardvarks and tenrecs from a single stock.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 10 million years
- Known to
- ± 3 million years
- Era
- Paleocene, Cenozoic
Africa spends the early Cenozoic separated from Eurasia by the Tethys, and the mammals on it radiate on their own. Molecular work in the 1990s produced one of the great surprises of modern systematics: elephants, manatees, hyraxes, aardvarks, elephant shrews and tenrecs — animals that look nothing alike and had been scattered across the classification — form a single group, Afrotheria, united by shared African ancestry rather than shared appearance. Geography, not anatomy, turned out to be the organising principle.