At the beginning of his quest to reach JRR Tolkien’s lonely mountain The Hobbit (1937), Bilbo Baggins and company cross paths with a huge, shape-shifting warrior named Beorn.
“Sometimes he’s a huge black bear,” says the wizard Gandalf about the man, “sometimes he’s a big man with strong black hair, huge arms and a fantastic beard.”
Either way, Beorn is a giant among his teammates. And now, paleontologists have immortalized the hairy and ax dirty with the discovery of an extinct mammal that played a leading role in the Paleocene era (between 65 and 23 million years ago), shortly after the death of the dinosaurs. They call this creature hairy and with a swollen cheek Beornus honeyi.
“I’ve always been a big fan of Tolkien, and there’s a long tradition of naming the first Paleocene mammals after Tolkien characters,” said Madelaine Atteberry, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of a new study. about B. honeyi and their relatives, they told Live Science in an email.
“I chose B. honeyi due to the large size and “swollen” appearance of their teeth compared to other mammals of this time period. “
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You might expect the Beorn of ancient mammals to be a huge, bear-like monster with sharp teeth and claws, but the reality, like Bilbo Baggins ’party, is a bit unexpected.
B. honeyi is a condylart, which is part of an order of four-legged prehistoric mammals that looked a bit like dogs, but were actually the ancestors of hoof mammals like horses and rhinos, according to the new study, published in 17 from August to Journal of Systematic Paleontology.
But Beornus he was not a rhino; fossils of the creature’s lower jaw suggest that it was no larger than a modern domestic cat.
In fact, this is huge compared to the menagerie of rat-sized condyles that roamed North America in the early Paleocene, according to researchers. This relative breadth, moreover B. honeyiThe extra large molars and swollen cheeks made her worthy of her Tolkien name, Atteberry said.
Like other condylers, Beornus probably used his large, flat teeth to grind plants, but he may also have eaten some occasional insect or any other source of meat, the team wrote.
But Beornus was just one of many small mammals that seem to have thrived after the fall of the dinosaurs.
In the same study, which included a series of jaw fossils excavated in the Great Division Basin south of Wyoming, researchers also identified two other species of condylarts unknown to science – Conacodon Hettingeri i Miniconus jeanninae.
The three newly described species were closely related, but presented differentiated differences in the shapes and sizes of their teeth.
These condyles could help rewrite the history of the first mammals that inhabited North America after the extinction of the dinosaurs, Atteberry said. Previous wildlife studies from the first 320,000 years after that mass extinction suggest that mammals were still recovering and that individual families such as condylers were diversifying very slowly.
“However, the oldest Paleocene fauna in the Great Division Basin in Wyoming is a different story,” Atteberry said. “It has more diversity than we would have predicted for this time period, suggesting that we cannot generalize mammal recovery after dinosaur extinction.”
In other words, Beorn and his friends may have been part of a thriving scene of small mammals during the early Paleocene. These three species are part of a collection of about 420 mammal fossils discovered in the Great Division basin alone and more recently found species from the same period are likely to appear, researchers said.
Perhaps those future fossil discoveries will also find a place in Tolkien’s club.
To date, more than two dozen extinct mammals have been christened Tolkien, including the weasel-like insectivore. Bombadili bubogony (named after the eccentric forest dweller Tom Bombadil) and the canine ancestor Orc barophagus (so named because of the brutal humanoids that Tolkien’s works popularized).
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.