There’s very little you’ll find in common with this primitive shrew-like creature, which weighed just 225g (8oz) and ate insects.
But this super furry animal is our most distant relative – the ancestor that gave rise to humans, according to scientists.
From it sprang every ‘placental’ mammal – those that give birth to mature live young, including dogs, cats, rodents, whales… and us.
Experts examined DNA and the physical traits of almost 90 species to travel back in time along our evolutionary family tree – and came up with this artist’s impression of what the mother of all mammals would have looked like.
It is thought to have evolved some 200,000 years after a massive asteroid impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65million years ago.
The research, reported in the journal Science, seems to confirm one hypothesis that placental mammals only flourished once dinosaurs died out – exploiting ecological niches left by the prehistoric reptiles.
Researcher Dr Maureen O’Leary, from Stony Brook University in New York, said: ‘Discovering the tree of life is like piecing together a crime scene. It is a story that happened in the past that you can’t repeat. Just like with a crime scene, the new tools of DNA add important information but so do other physical clues like a body or, in the scientific realm, fossils and anatomy. Combining all the evidence produces the most informed reconstruction of a past event.’
Colleague Dr Jonathan Bloch, of the Florida Museum of Natural History, said: ‘This gives us a new perspective of how major change can influence the history of life, like the extinction of the dinosaurs.
‘This was a major event in Earth’s history that potentially then results in setting the framework for the entire ordinal diversification of mammals, including our own very distant ancestors.’