Cronopio dentiacutus It had very long teeth, a narrow snout and wide eye sockets, which means that it probably moved at night in order to survive among the large carnivorous animals of the Cretaceous, according to the team that discovered the fossil in the Patagonian province of Río Negro. who publishes his discovery in the magazineNature. The fossil was found in a sediment bed where dinosaur bones have also appeared.
The tiny creature was probably less than 6 inches long and shared characteristics with the saber-toothed squirrel featured in the popular movie.Ice Age. But it is presumed that theCronopio dentiacutus ate insects, not nuts, and was a driolestoid, an extinct groupmore like today’s marsupials than squirrels, the scientists clarify.
The skull and jaw fragments bridge a 60-million-year gap in the mammalian fossil record, say paleontologists Sebastián Apesteguía, Leandro Gaetano and Guillermo Rougier. Christian de Muizon, a scientist at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who was not involved in the find but who comments on it inNature, has valued it as“a great paleontological event”Considering that finding reasonably well-preserved fossils of mammalian skulls from that period is extremely rare. “Is hefirst mammal from the Upper Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era to be found in South America“De Muizon said.” And extraordinarily complete Mesozoic fossil discoveries always represent giant steps “in mammalian paleontology, he added.
