Our ancestors had powerful night-time vision

​New York: New genetic evidence confirms a long-held hypothesis that our earliest mammalian ancestors indeed had powerful night-time vision.

The findings published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that adapting to life in the dark helped the early mammals find food and avoid reptilian predators that hunted by day.

The research team examined genes involved in night vision in animals throughout the evolutionary tree, looking for places where those genes became enhanced.

"This method is like using the genome as a fossil record, and with it we've shown when genes involved in night vision appear," said lead researcher Liz Hadly, Professor of Biology at Stanford University in the US. "It's a very powerful way of corroborating a story that has been, up to now, only hypothesized," Hadly said.

Mammals and reptiles share a common ancestor, with the earliest mammal-like animals appearing in the Late Triassic about 200 million years ago.

Fossil evidence suggests that early mammals had excellent hearing and sense of smell and were likely also warm-blooded. All of these features are common in their descendants, the living mammals, most of whom are nocturnal.