Three new species of extinct South American marsupials discovered

Findings show the family, Palaeothentidae, was once widespread across the continent but add to extinction doubts

Date: April 11, 2017

Source: Case Western Reserve University

The discovery of three extinct species and new insights to a fourth indicates a little-known family of marsupials, the Palaeothentidae, was diverse and existed over a wide range of South America as recent as 13 million years ago.

The finding, however, complicates the question: why did these animals go extinct?

"It was previously assumed this group slowly went extinct over a long time period, but that's probably not the case," said Russell Engelman, a biology MS student at Case Western Reserve and lead author of a new study on the group. "They were doing very well at the time they were supposedly on death's door."

Discovering new fossil sites may be the only way to learn the answer, researchers say.

Engelman; along with Federico Anaya, professor of geological engineering at Universidad Autónoma Tomás Frías, in Potosí, Bolivia; and Darin Croft, anatomy professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, describe the animals, where they fit in the family, and their paleoecology and paleobiology in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

Fossils of the new species were found at Quebrada Honda, a high elevation fossil site in southern Bolivia. They are about 13 million years old (from the middle Miocene epoch), placing them among the youngest known palaeothentid fossils.

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