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.
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