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Maintained by pioweb@ucsc.edu. The common ancestor of placental mammals probably looked like Eomaia scansoria, the earliest known placental mammal, shown here in an artist's reconstruction based on a 125-million-year-old fossil skeleton found in China in 2002.aintained by pioweb@ucsc.edu. The common ancestor of placental mammals probably looked like Eomaia scansoria, the earliest known placental mammal, shown here in an artist's reconstruction based on a 125-million-year-old fossil skeleton found in China in 2002.
These early mammals were small, insectivorous, nocturnal, hairy and warm-blooded. Warm-bloodedness is believed to have first evolved among the cynodonts, a late but successful group of mammal-like reptiles from which the mammals evolved. The cynodonts were the only mammal-like reptiles to survive to the Jurassic, in fact they nearly made it into the Cretaceous, and definitely coexisted with many of the major dinosaurs.