1. Aronson, B. D. et al. Circadian rhythms. Brain Res. Rev. 18, 315–333 (1993).

2. Kronfeld-Schor, N. & Dayan, T. Partitioning of time as an ecological resource. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 34, 153–181 (2003).

3. DeCoursey, P. J. Diversity of function of SCN pacemakers in behavior and ecology of three species of sciurid rodents. Biol. Rhythm Res. 35, 13–33 (2004).

4. Hut, R. A., Kronfeld-Schor, N., van der Vinne, V. & De la Iglesia, H. in Progress in Brain Research: The Neurobiology of Circadian Timing Vol. 199 (eds Kalsbeek, A., Merrow, M., Roenneberg, T. & Foster, R. G.) 281–304 (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2012).

5. Joffe, B., Peichl, L., Hendrickson, A., Leonhardt, H. & Solovei, I. Diurnality and nocturnality in primates: an analysis from the rod photoreceptor nuclei perspective. Evol. Biol. 41, 1–11 (2014).

6. Melin, A. D., Matsushita, Y., Moritz, G. L., Dominy, N. J. & Kawamura, S. Inferred L/M cone opsin polymorphism of ancestral tarsiers sheds dim light on the origin of anthropoid primates. Proc. R. Soc. B 280, 20130189 (2013).

7. Gutman, R. & Dayan, T. Temoral partitioning: a experiment with two species of spiny mice. Ecology 86, 164–173 (2005).

8. Jones, K. E. et al. PanTHERIA: a species-level database of life history, ecology, and geography of extant and recently extinct mammals. Ecology 90, 2648–2648 (2009).

9. Refinetti, R. The diversity of temporal niches in mammals. Biol. Rhythm Res. 39,173–192 (2008).

10. Heesy, C. P. & Hall, M. I. The nocturnal bottleneck and the evolution of mammalian vision. Brain Behav. Evol. 75, 195–203 (2010).

11. Walls, G. L. The Vertebrate Eye and its Adaptive Radiation (Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bloomfield Hills, 1942).

12. Davies, W. I. L., Collin, S. P. & Hunt, D. M. Molecular ecology and adaptation of visual photopigments in craniates. Mol. Ecol. 21, 3121–3158 (2012).

13. Gerkema, M. P., Davies, W. I. L., Foster, R. G., Menaker, M. & Hut, R. A. The nocturnal bottleneck and the evolution of activity patterns in mammals. Proc. R. Soc. B 280, 20130508 (2013).

14. Peichl, L. Diversity of mammalian photoreceptor properties: adaptations to habitat and lifestyle? Anat. Rec. 287A, 1001–1012 (2005).

15. Hayden, S. et al. Ecological adaptation determines functional mammalian olfactory subgenomes. Genome Res. 20, 1–9 (2010).

16. Coleman, M. N. & Boyer, D. M. Inner ear evolution in primates through the Cenozoic: implications for the evolution of hearing. Anat. Rec. 295, 615–631 (2012).

17. Diamond, M. E., von Heimendahl, M., Knutsen, P. M., Kleinfeld, D. & Ahissar, E. ‘Where’ and ‘what’ in the whisker sensorimotor system. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 9, 601–612 (2008).

18. Crompton, A. W., Taylor, C. R. & Jagger, J. A. Evolution of homeothermy in mammals. Nature 272, 333–336 (1978).

19. Barnosky, A. D. et al. Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471, 51–57 (2011).

20. Brusatte, S. L. et al. The extinction of the dinosaurs. Biol. Rev. 90, 628–642 (2015).

21. Angielczyk, K. D. & Schmitz, L. Nocturnality in synapsids predates the origin of mammals by over 100 million years. Proc. R. Soc. B 281, 20141642 (2014).

22. Schmitz, L. & Motani, R. Nocturnality in dinosaurs inferred from scleral ring and orbit morphology. Science 332, 705–708 (2011).

23. Hall, M. I., Kamilar, J. M. & Kirk, E. C. Eye shape and the nocturnal bottleneck of mammals. Proc. R. Soc. B 279, 4962–4968 (2012).

24. Emerling, C. A., Huynh, H. T., Nguyen, M. A., Meredith, R. W. & Springer, M. S. Spectral shifts of mammalian ultraviolet-sensitive pigments (short wavelength-sensitive opsin 1) are associated with eye length and photic niche evolution. Proc. R. Soc. B 282, 20151817 (2015).

25. Reppert, S. M. & Weaver, D. R. Molecular analysis of mammalian circadian rhythms. Annu. Rev. Physiol. 63, 647–676 (2001).

26. Griffin, R. H., Matthews, L. J. & Nunn, C. L. Evolutionary disequilibrium and activity period in primates: a Bayesian phylogenetic approach. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 147, 409–416 (2012).

27. Santini, L., Rojas, D. & Donati, G. Evolving through day and night: origin and diversification of activity pattern in modern primates. Behav. Ecol. 26, 789–796 (2015).

28. Heesy, C. P. & Ross, C. F. Evolution of activity patterns and chromatic vision in primates: morphometrics, genetics and cladistics. J. Hum. Evol. 40, 111–149 (2001).

29. Roll, U., Dayan, T. & Kronfeld-Schor, N. On the role of phylogeny in determining activity patterns of rodents. Evol. Ecol. 20, 479–490 (2006).

30. Meredith, R. W. et al. Impacts of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution and K–Pg extinction on mammal diversification. Science 334, 521–524 (2011).

31. Bininda-Emonds, O. R. P. et al. The delayed rise of present-day mammals. Nature 446, 507–512 (2007).

32. Fritz, S. A., Bininda-Emonds, O. R. P. & Purvis, A. Geographical variation in predictors of mammalian extinction risk: big is bad, but only in the tropics. Ecol. Lett. 12, 538–549 (2009).

33. Meade, A. & Pagel, M. BayesTraits: A Computer Package for Analyses of Trait Evolution. Version 3 (2017); http://www.evolution.rdg.ac.uk/BayesTraits.html

34. Melin, A. D. et al. Euarchontan opsin variation brings new focus to primate origins. Mol. Biol. Evol. 33, 1029–1041 (2016).

35. Sakamoto, M., Benton, M. J. & Venditti, C. Dinosaurs in decline tens of millions of years before their final extinction. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 5036–5040 (2016).

36. Close R. A., Friedman, M., Lloyd G. T. & Benson R. B. J. Evidence for a mid-Jurassic adaptive radiation in mammals. Curr. Biol. 25, 2137–2142 (2015).

37. Lee, M. S. Y. & Beck, R. M. D. Mammalian evolution: a Jurassic spark. Curr. Biol. 25, R759–R761 (2015).

38. Wilson G. P. et al. Adaptive radiation of multituberculate mammals before the extinction of dinosaurs. Nature 483, 457–460 (2012).

39. Krause, D. W. et al. First cranial remains of a gondwanatherian mammal reveal remarkable mosaicism. Nature 515, 512–517 (2014).

40. Ross, C. F. Into the light: the origin of Anthropoidea. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 29, 147–194 (2000).

41. Dos Reis, M., Donoghue, P. C. J. & Yang, Z. Neither phylogenomic nor palaeontological data support a Palaeogene origin of placental mammals. Biol. Lett. 10, 20131003 (2014).

42. Foley, N. M., Springer, M. S. & Teeling, E. C. Mammal madness: is the mammal tree of life not yet resolved? Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 371, 20150140 (2016).

43. Tarver, J. E. et al. The interrelationships of placental mammals and the limits of phylogenetic inference. Genome Biol. Evol. 8, 330–344 (2016).

44. Springer, M. S. et al. Waking the undead: implications of a soft explosive model for the timing of placental mammal diversification. Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 106, 86–102 (2017).

45. Donati, G. & Borgognini-Tarli, S. M. From darkness to daylight: cathemeral activity in primates. J. Anthropol. Sci. 84, 7–32 (2006).

46. Fullard, J. H. & Napoleone, N. Diel flight periodicity and the evolution of auditory defences in the Macrolepidoptera. Anim. Behav. 62, 349–368 (2001).

47. O’Leary, M. A. et al. The placental mammal ancestor and the post-K–Pg radiation of placentals. Science 339, 662–667 (2013).

48. Wilson, D. E. & Reeder, D. A. Mammal Species of the World (John Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, 2005).

49. Price, S. A., Bininda-Emonds, O. R. P. & Gittleman, J. L. A complete phylogeny of the whales, dolphins and even-toed hoofed mammals (Cetartiodactyla). Biol. Rev. 80, 445–473 (2005).

50. O’Leary, M. A. & Gatesy, J. Impact of increased character sampling on the phylogeny of Cetartiodactyla (Mammalia): combined analysis including fossils. Cladistics 24, 397–442 (2008).

51. Springer, M. S., Meredith, R. W., Teeling, E. C. & Murphy, W. J. Technical comment on “The placental mammal ancestor and the Post-K–Pg radiation of placentals”. Science 341, 613–613 (2013).

52. Paradis, E., Claude, J. & Strimmer, K. APE: analyses of phylogenetics and evolution in R language. Bioinformatics 20, 289–290 (2004).

53. Schliep, K. P. phangorn: phylogenetic analysis in R. Bioinformatics 27, 592–593 (2011).

54. R Development Core Team R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, 2015).

55. Pagel, M. & Meade, A. Bayesian analysis of correlated evolution of discrete characters by reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo. Am. Nat. 167, 808–825 (2006).

56. Kirk, E. C. Effects of activity pattern on eye size and orbital aperture size in primates. J. Hum. Evol. 51, 159–170 (2006).

57. Xie, W., Lewis, P. O., Fan, Y., Kuo, L. & Chen, M.-H. Improving marginal likelihood estimation for Bayesian phylogenetic model selection. Syst. Biol. 60,150–160 (2011).

58. Revell, L. J. phytools: an R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other things). Methods Ecol. Evol. 3, 217–223 (2012).

59. Maddison, W. P. Confounding asymmetries in evolutionary diverification and character change. Evolution 60, 1743–1746 (2006).

60. FitzJohn, R. G. Diversitree: comparative phylogenetic analyses of diversification in R. Methods Ecol. Evol. 3, 1084–1092 (2012).