Each mammalian genus examined so far contains 50,000-100,000 members of an L1 (LINE 1) family of long interspersed repeated DNA elements. Current knowledge on the evolution of L1 families presents a paradox because, although L1 families have been in mammalian genomes since before the mammalian radiation approximately 80 million years ago, most members of the L1 families are only a few million years old. Accordingly it has been suggested either that the extensive amplification that characterizes present-day L1 families did not occur in the past or that old members were removed as new ones were generated. However, we show here that an ancestral rodent L1 family was extensively amplified approximately 10 million years ago and that the relics (approximately 60,000 copies) of this amplification have persisted in modern murine genomes (Old World rats and mice). This amplification occurred just before the divergence of modern murine genera from their common ancestor and identifies the murine node in the lineage of modern muroid rodents. Our results suggest that repeated amplification of L1 elements is a feature of the evolution of mammalian genomes and that ancestral amplification events could provide a useful tool for determining mammalian lineages.