new, but very old animal found.

in itself not even that strange, there are always nice finds of something from days well before, and it is often quite fascinating stuff. always nice to hear new pieces of darwins puzzel are found.

this one has a name militocodon lydae. but o, boy, how much confusion can you get.

it was today time to tell the dutch about this animal, lived around 65 million years ago, so far there seems to be a bit of agreement, but the dutch are told this animal had a weight of about a dutch pound, what we have to write as 500 grams, and it had the size of a rat, must be the many generations removed great , great grandparents of animals we know today, we call horses, zebra and deer.

but it was quite a small bit of message, and that lead me putting the name into google.

so now i was told it looked like a chinchilla, i think i would not have seen that likeness so easy. more a sort of dwarf of a dwarf panda, at least there it has a weight of a pound too, but there it is one of 455 grams.

but it must be the the same set of grandparents , but that resulted in cows, deer and pigs.

so i decided to just look for the original paper, and yes, i am quite used to the language of science, but i bow out for this one,
it looks a bit as scrabble for the very advanced players.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10914-024-09716-5

luckily they do offer a bit of translation, very helpful, so it does not looked like a chincilla, but has about the size of it.

https://www.dmns.org/press-room/press-releases/colorado-discovery-museum-scientists-identify-new-species-of-mammal-from-just-after-the-extinction-of-the-dinosaurs/

still not much in easy language about the later species, but at least it are all animals with hooves, but the conclusion was made based on teeth. and it must be from well before all in the family walked of into the animals we know today.
it would not be the last time we heard about it, at least it would be nice of some made a bit easier to read article.

and of course it has a bit of a message in it, if you start to eat veggies long enough, you can end up unrecognizable when looking in the mirror after a fair bit of time.