At the beginning of their quest to reach the Lonely Mountain in “The Hobbit” by JRR Tolkien (1937), Bilbo Baggins and friends met a formidable shape-shaper fighter named Beorn.
The wizard Gandalf said of the man: “Sometimes a big black bear, and sometimes a strong man, with black hair and big arms and a big beard.”
In both forms, Bjorn is a giant among his peers. And now, paleontologists have immortalized the ax-wielding beast with the discovery of an extinct mammal appearing in Time Paleocene (65 million to 23 million years ago), shortly after death dinosaur. They call this hairy, puffy-cheeked creature Bjornos darling.
“I’ve always been a huge Tolkien fan, and there’s a long tradition of naming ancient mammals after Tolkien’s characters,” Madeleine Atberry, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of a new study on Tolkien, said. B. Honey and his relatives to Live Science via email. “I choose Bjornos darling Due to the large size and ‘protruding’ appearance of their teeth compared to other mammals of this period.”
Related: The 6 smallest mammals in the world
You might think the early mammals of Beorn were large bear-like beasts with sharp teeth and claws — but the truth is they are very similar Pesta Bilbo Baggins, a little unexpected.
B. Honey They are pods — part of an order of prehistoric four-legged mammals that look a bit like dogs, but are actually ancestors of hoofed mammals like horses and rhinos, according to the new study, published Aug. 17 in Journal of Systematic Paleontology. But purnos It wasn’t a rhino. Fossils of the creature’s mandibles suggest it was no bigger than a modern domestic cat.
That’s actually very large compared to the size of the zoo rats that roamed North America in the early Paleocene, according to the researchers. This relative generosity is a plus B. HoneyAtbury said his massive molars and puffy cheeks earned him his Tolkien-esque name. Like any other bite, purnos The team writes that he likely used his large, flat teeth to grind plants, but he may have also eaten the occasional insect or other meat source.
But purnos It was just one of many small mammals that seemed to thrive after the fall of the dinosaurs. In the same study, which included a number of jaw fossils unearthed from the Great Divide Basin in southern Wyoming, the researchers also identified two other types of bites previously unknown to science – Conacodon Plantation Center And Miniconus jeanninae. The three species just described are closely related, but show clear differences in the shape and size of their teeth.
This bite could help rewrite the story of the oldest mammals to inhabit North America after the extinction of the dinosaurs, Atbury said. Previous animal studies from 320,000 years later mass extinction He suggested that mammals were still recovering, and that individual families such as stingrays were diversifying very slowly.
“However, the oldest Paleocene fauna in Wyoming’s Great Dividing Basin is a different story,” Ateberry said. “It has more diversity than we expected for this time period, which suggests that we can’t really generalize about the recovery of mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs.”
In other words, Bjorn and his colleagues may have been part of the small mammal landscape that developed during the early Paleocene. The three species are part of a group of about 420 mammal fossils found in the Great Divide Basin alone, and it is likely that many more newly discovered species from the same era have emerged there, the researchers said.
Maybe that futuristic fossil find will have a place in the Tolkien Club too. More than two dozen extinct mammals have been named after Tolkien’s knowledge to date, including the weasel-like insect. Bombadelli Bobogoni (named after the eccentric forest dweller Tom Bombadil) and the ancestor of dogs Orc Barophagus (Named after the wild man who popularized Tolkien’s work.)
Originally published in Live Science.
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