[ExI] This 'crazy beast' that lived with the dinosaurs was unlike other creatures

[John Grigg]

"Scientists say they're baffled by the strange appearance of a
66-million-year-old
opossum-sized mammal dubbed the  Adalatherium
<https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/tfg-tb121420.php> -- which
translates as "crazy beast."

"Knowing what we know about the skeletal anatomy of all living and extinct
mammals, it is difficult to imagine that a mammal like Adalatherium could
have evolved," David Krause, of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science,
said in a release. "It bends and even breaks a lot of rules."

On Friday, Krause, along with the New York Institute of Technology's Simone
Hoffmann and their team, published a 234-page study of a fossilized
skeleton of Adalatherium
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2020.1805455>
unearthed in 1999. They first announced the results of 20 years of research
in April, in the magazine
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2234-8> Nature. Today's
in-depth paper appears in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir
Series <https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ujvp20/40/sup1>, an annual
publication that takes deep-dive looks at the most important vertebrate
fossils.

The researchers describe the creature as having had muscular hind limbs
like a crocodile's, powerful front legs, rabbitlike front teeth and odd
back teeth that look completely unlike those of any other known mammal. It
also had an unusual space between the bones at the top of its snout and
more trunk vertebrae than most other mammals."
https://www.cnet.com/news/this-crazy-beast-that-lived-with-the-dinosaurs-was-unlike-other-creatures/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20210102/ea9e7b52/attachment.htm>