Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
According to National Geographic a new - extinct species of mammal has been discovered in China:
Scientists in China have discovered a fossilized small, furry animal that walked like a platypus but looked like a shrew. The unusual find provides important new clues to the evolution of early mammals, the researchers say.Found in the province of Liaoning in northeast China, the well-preserved fossil shows a previously unknown species of insect-eating mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs some 125 million years ago.
The mammal is 4 inches long and weighed less than an ounce.
Named Akidolestes, the extinct animal had jaws, teeth, and forelimbs that identify it as a close relative of modern placental and marsupial mammals.
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But the researchers noted a highly unusual back-half to its skeleton—similar to that of primitive, egg-laying mammals known as monotremes.
*snip*
"This new fossil is a chimera of body structures of different kinds of mammals," said Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."Its front half resembles those of more derived marsupials and placentals, but its back half is unmistakably monotreme-like."
Researchers claim it supports the theory that mammals originated in Asia.
Researchers have an interesting explanation for it's morphology:
Such a mix of modern and primitive features hasn't been seen before in a mammal, the authors say.
They add that the fossil challenges conventional wisdom about how placental mammals split from earlier egg-layers.
The split may not have been as clear-cut as previously thought, they say. Some placental mammals have have readopted some of the physical characteristics of monotremes.
*snip*
Thomas Martin, head of mammalogy at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, agrees that Akidolestes may represent some kind of evolutionary throwback.The animal's curious combination of traits could be caused "by developmental genes that sporadically become active in widely separated mammalian [groups]," he said.
The research is reported in Nature (I, for one, think this would be an interesting read).
