In this paper:
The delayed rise of present-day mammals.
Bininda-Emonds OR, Cardillo M, Jones KE, MacPhee RD, Beck RM, Grenyer R, Price SA, Vos RA, Gittleman JL, Purvis A.
Nature. 2007 Mar 29;446(7135):507-12.
PMID: 17392779
There is a beautiful tree of mammalian evolution, with monotremes and marsupials as "outgroup".
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dW3il_Qw3jg/Ug6Y08JL3_I/AAAAAAAAA9s/NTT7H8bfZgg/w1499-h1253-no/MammalsTreeJPG.jpg
The tree figure seems to indicate that there were just 3 lineages that survived from a common ancestor some 160 million years ago, until mammals, marsupials and monotremes each began to diverge into present-day species some 80 million years ago.
Does this seem correct? How solid are these dates?
There is a Middle Jurassic stem group for monotremes and some early relatives of marsupials as well as placentals have been described from the Early Cretaceous (see e.g. review by Luo 2007). Assuming that the assignment of these fossils is correct, a time-calibrated tree taking into account their fossil ages will probably look like the one depicted by Bininda-Emonds and colleagues (2007).
http://webh01.ua.ac.be/funmorph/raoul/fylsyst/Luo2007.pdf
Thanks! Bininda-Emonds has a 2012 paper on evolution of carnivores too:
Updating the evolutionary history of Carnivora (Mammalia): a new species-level supertree complete with divergence time estimates.
Nyakatura K, Bininda-Emonds OR.
BMC Biol. 2012 Feb 27;10:12. doi: 10.1186/1741-7007-10-12.
PMID: 22369503
Joint reconstruction of divergence times and life-history evolution in placental mammals using a phylogenetic covariance model.
Lartillot N, Delsuc F.
Evolution. 2012 Jun;66(6):1773-87. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01558.x. Epub 2012 Jan 23.
PMID: 22671546
The Lartillot data is available in NEXUS format in the data DRYAD:
Lartillot N, Delsuc F (2012) Data from: Joint reconstruction of divergence times and life-history evolution in placental mammals using a phylogenetic covariance model. Dryad Digital Repository. doi:10.5061/dryad.tt28qk6f
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