Fossilized remains of a “swamp dweller” approximately 75 million years old have been discovered by paleontologists in northwest Colorado.
University of Colorado team behind the search have been excavating just outside Rangely, Colorado for 15 years and recently unearthed one of their largest and strangest discoveries to date – the jawbone of a Heliocola picinusOr “vertebrate swamp dweller”.
The swamp dweller looks exactly as the name suggests. It was a very rodent-like marsupial, exactly the size of a muskrat, weighing up to two pounds. However, this size was actually relatively large compared to most Cretaceous period mammals.
“They’re not all small,” said Professor Jaelyn Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the CU Museum of Natural History. CU Boulder today,
“There are some animals emerging from the Late Cretaceous that are much larger than we expected 20 years ago.”
Eberle said that after an asteroid destroyed nearly all non-avian animals 66 million years ago, mammals were generally small in size, usually about the same height as modern rats and mice. Because of this, many people are identified largely through fossilized teeth.
70 million years ago, Colorado was nothing more than an inland sea, with the land around it consisting primarily of swamps and marshes. The fossil was found where land and sea would have met at that time.
The only inhabitants of the area, other than those living in the swamp, would probably include traditional swamp creatures such as turtles and giant crocodiles.
“This area could look a lot like Louisiana,” study co-author Rebecca Hunt-Foster told CU Boulder Today.
“We saw a lot of animals living very happily in the water like sharks, rays and guitarfish.”
The discovery team celebrated offbeat and kept digging in western Colorado as long as they could.
“It’s a small town, but in my experience as a paleontologist, a lot of good things come out of rural environments,” Eberle told CU Boulder Today. “It’s great to see that an exciting discovery was made in western Colorado.”
“We have scientists from all over the world who come specifically to study our fossils. “We’re really lucky.”
(TagstoTranslate)US News(T)Colorado(T)Discovery(T)Fossil
