article_snippet: The continents native ungulates - hooved animals - have baffled palaeontologists as The continents native ungulates - hooved animals - share traits with rodents, elephants and camels.
article_snippet: The two groups of primates then evolved separately to create distinct families of primates.
article_snippet: Dr Ross MacPhee, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History's department of mammalogy and one of the authors of the study, said: 'Fitting South American ungulates to the mammalian family tree has always been a major challenge for palaeontologists, because anatomically the mammalian family tree were these weird mosaics, exhibiting features found in a huge variety of quite unrelated species living all over the place . '
article_snippet: This is what puzzled Darwin and Darwin collaborator Richard Owen so much in the early 19th century. '
article_snippet: With all of these conflicting signals, Darwin and his collaborator Richard Owen couldn’t say whether Darwin and his collaborator Richard Owen related to giant rodents, or elephants, or camels—or
highlights_snippet: Palaeontologists have struggled to decide whether the strange looking animals were more closely related to rodents, camels or elephants .
  