Why aren’t docodonts considered mammals? What distinguishes mammaliaformes from true mammals?
PragyaEnlightened
Why aren’t docodonts considered mammals? What distinguishes mammaliaformes from true mammals?
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To be frank, it appears to be an arbitrary effort to redefine a term that already had a well-established definition. Mammalia, as an apomorphic clade, probably encompasses at least the same set of organisms as Mammaliamorpha (including Docodonta) because dental evidence indicates that early mammaliamorphs nursed their young. However, some cladists are averse to using apomorphy-based definitions for clades and have attempted to redefine Mammalia as the lineage originating from the most recent common ancestor of monotremes and therians, which is linguistically inaccurate.