New Scientist Live:
24 August 2016
Zoologger is
our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other
organisms – from around the world
By Alice Klein
Species: Pig-footed
bandicoot, Chaeropus ecaudatus
Habitat: Australia
Habitat: Australia
It had a bizarre set of
horse-like hind feet and pig-like fore feet, but it looked like a rat. A collection
of fossils gathering dust on a back shelf has yielded new insights into one of
Australia’s most mysterious marsupials, the pig-footed bandicoot, which went
extinct in the 1950s.
It is the smallest grazing mammal
ever documented, weighing about 200 grams, and had several unique features –
including its feet. And it seems its grazing abilities evolved unusually
quickly.
Kenny
Travouillon at the Western Australian Museum in Perth studied three
fossil teeth that had been languishing in the museum’s collection since they
were dug up in New South Wales in the 1970s.
He found that Chaeropus ecaudatus evolved from an
earlier omnivorous species – C.
baynesi – which lived in Australia two million years earlier.
A rapidly drying climate may have
prompted the switch to grazing, but two million years is an unusually short
time frame, Travouillon says. “Evolution of diets usually takes many millions
of years.”
Adding to the mystery is the fact
that small mammals do not normally graze, he says. “They don’t have big enough
stomachs to digest grass for a long time to extract the little nutrients.”
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