‘I have never written of a stranger organ’: The rise of the placenta and how it helped make us human

In this adapted excerpt from “Infinite Life: The Story of Eggs, Evolution, and Life on Earth,” (Pegasus Books, 2024) author Jules Howard examines the invasiveness of the placenta — how far it permeates into the wall of the uterus and the maternal tissue — in mammals after the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck.


Although it has not been preserved in the fossil record, the diversity of placentae among modern-day mammals suggests that, about 10 or 20 million years after the end-Cretaceous, at around the time that the animals of the Messel Pit were alive, the mammal placenta was changing. Natural selection was tweaking this organ.

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