Cambaytherium

Cambaytherium was a genus of herbivorous, digitigrade, four legged quadrupeds with small hooves. Cambaytherium was roughly the size of a pig and likely weighed 45 to 75 pounds (20.4 to 34 kg). Based on analysis of shapes and surfaces of the long bones of its limbs Cambaytherium also probably had five finger-like or toe-like bones, although Ken Rose, the leader of the research team that discovered many of the fossils of Cambaytherium hesitated at calling them digits. That number was reduced in perissodactyls as they developed more modern hooves.[3] Many of Cambaytherium's features, such as the teeth, the number of sacral vertebrae, and the bones of the hands and feet, are quite intermediate between Perissodactyla and earlier mammals and Ken Rose stated that the findings help to make a window of what the common ancestor of all of Perissodactyla looked like.

Cambaytherium is considered to be close to the ancestry of Perissodactyla, the odd-toed ungulates. It retains features later lost among its sister mammals, the perissodactyls, which includes tapirs, rhinoceroses, and horses. The presence of the sister group of perissodactyls in western India near or before the time of its collision with Asia, suggests that Perissodactyla may have originated on the Indian Plate during its final drift toward Asia.[3]