No, This Tiny Beast Is Not Half-Mammal, Half-Reptile (But It's Still Super Cool)

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | May 31, 2018 12:35pm ET

A small, furry animal with a blunt snout and beady eyes scuttled across what is now eastern Utah some 130 million years ago. And while the wee beast was surely unusual and fascinating, there's one thing it was definitely not: half-mammal and half-reptile.

Headlines about the recent find have described it as though it were some bizarre hybrid of reptile and mammal. But while it might be amusing to imagine a beast with the front end of a lizard and the rear end of a rat, it's not very scientific. [Real or Fake? 8 Bizarre Hybrid Animals]

The little animal, which would have stood just 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) tall and weighed about 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms), belonged to a group known as the haramiyidans, which emerged during the late Triassic period (251 million to 199 million years ago), and are known mostly from fossil teeth. Scientists have argued over whether haramiyidans were early mammals or a sister group — closely related to mammals, but lacking some features used by paleontologists to decide who's a mammal and who's not.

Read on

No, This Tiny Beast Is Not Half-Mammal, Half-Reptile (But It's Still Super Cool)

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | May 31, 2018 12:35pm ET

A small, furry animal with a blunt snout and beady eyes scuttled across what is now eastern Utah some 130 million years ago. And while the wee beast was surely unusual and fascinating, there's one thing it was definitely not: half-mammal and half-reptile.

Headlines about the recent find have described it as though it were some bizarre hybrid of reptile and mammal. But while it might be amusing to imagine a beast with the front end of a lizard and the rear end of a rat, it's not very scientific. [Real or Fake? 8 Bizarre Hybrid Animals]

The little animal, which would have stood just 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) tall and weighed about 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms), belonged to a group known as the haramiyidans, which emerged during the late Triassic period (251 million to 199 million years ago), and are known mostly from fossil teeth. Scientists have argued over whether haramiyidans were early mammals or a sister group — closely related to mammals, but lacking some features used by paleontologists to decide who's a mammal and who's not.

Read on 

Newly Discovered Squirrel-Like Creatures Suggest Mammals First Appeared In The Late Triassic

September 14, 2014

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

The discovery of three new small squirrel-like species lends evidence to the notion that mammals originated at least 208 million years ago in the late Triassic Period, according to new research appearing in a recent edition of the journal Nature.

The research, which was led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, places a poorly understood group of animals that lived in the Mesozoic era in the diverse family tree of mammals, which includes egg-laying monotremes like the platypus, marsupials like the opossum, and placentals like humans and whales.

“For decades, scientists have been debating whether the extinct group, called Haramiyida, belongs within or outside of Mammalia,” said co-author Jin Meng, a curator in the museum’s Division of Paleontology. “Previously, everything we knew about these animals was based on fragmented jaws and isolated teeth.”

“But the new specimens we discovered are extremely well preserved. And based on these fossils, we now have a good idea of what these animals really looked like, which confirms that they are, indeed, mammals,” he added. “They were good climbers and probably spent more time than squirrels in trees. Their hands and feet were adapted for holding branches, but not good for running on the ground.”

Those three new species – Shenshou lui, Xianshou linglong, and Xianshou songae – were described using six nearly complete 160 million year old fossils originally discovered in China, the researchers said. They were placed in a new group known as Euharamiyida that resembled small squirrels. Meng’s team believe that they weighed between one and 10 ounces, and that they ate insects, nuts, and fruit with teeth that had raised points on the crowns.

Read more at

Prehistoric bugs from 230 million years ago found in amber (Update)

(Phys.org)—An international team of scientists has discovered the oldest record of arthropods—invertebrate animals that include insects, arachnids, and crustaceans—preserved in amber. The specimens, one fly and two mites found in millimeter-scale droplets of amber from northeastern Italy, are about 100 million years older than any other amber arthropod ever collected. The group's findings, which are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pave the way for a better evolutionary understanding of the most diverse group of organisms in the world.


"Amber is an extremely valuable tool for paleontologists because it preserves specimens with microscopic fidelity, allowing uniquely accurate estimates of the amount of evolutionary change over millions of years," said corresponding author David Grimaldi, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Invertebrate Zoology and a world authority on amber and fossil arthropods. Globules of fossilized resin are typically called amber. Amber ranges in age from the Carboniferous (about 340 million years ago) to about 40,000 years ago, and has been produced by myriad plants, from tree ferns to flowering trees, but predominantly by conifers. Even though arthropods are more than 400 million years old, until now, the oldest record of the animals in amber dates to about 130 million years. The newly discovered arthropods break that mold with an age of 230 million years. They are the first arthropods to be found in amber from the Triassic Period.

Continued:   http://phys.org/news/2012-08-prehistoric-bugs-million-years.html