Article in Journal of Mammalian Evolution: Micromys minutus as a model to study the arboreality of extinct eutherians

In the Journal of Mammalian Evolution, you can find a paper by Leszek Rychlik (Department of Systematic Zoology) and collaborators (from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris), in which they analyse vertical locomotion of the Eurasian harvest mouse Micromys minutus on substrates differing in diameter. Harvest mice display some morpho-functional similarities to the oldest known eutherians, Juramaia sinensis (160 mya) and Eomaia scansoria (125 mya). This fact and the obtained results show that extant small mammals such as M. minutus are good models for investigations of the behavioural mechanisms related to the evolution of arboreality in early mammals.

The paper is available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10914-016-9374-5