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At the start of their quest to reach the Lonely Mountain in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), Bilbo Baggins and company cross paths with an enormous shapeshifter warrior named Beorn.
“Sometimes he’s a huge black bear,” the sorcerer Gandalf says of the man, “sometimes he’s a big, dark-haired man with huge arms and a big beard.”
Either way, Beorn is a giant among his peers. And now paleontologists have immortalized the shaggy, ax-wielding bully with the discovery of an extinct mammal that rose to prominence in the Paleocene era (65 to 23 million years ago), shortly. after the dinosaurs died. They call this hairy and swollen creature Beornus honeyi.
“I have always been a huge fan of Tolkien, and there is a long tradition of naming the earliest Paleocene mammals after Tolkien characters,” Madelaine Atteberry, University of Colorado Boulder researcher and lead author of a new study on B. darling and relatives, Live Science said in an email.
“I have chosen B. darling due to the large size and “swollen” appearance of its teeth compared to other mammals of this period. “
Related: The 6 Smallest Mammals In The World
You might expect the Beorn of ancient mammals to be a huge bear-like monster with sharp teeth and claws – but the reality, much like Bilbo Baggins’ party, is a bit unexpected.
B. darling is a condylarth – part of an order of prehistoric four-legged mammals that looked a bit like dogs, but were actually the ancestors of hoofed mammals like horses and rhinos, according to the new study, published Aug. 17 in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.
Corn Béornus was not a rhino; fossils in the creature’s lower jaw suggest it was no bigger than a modern domestic cat.
That’s actually huge compared to the menagerie of rat-sized condyloarthritis that roamed North America in the early Paleocene, researchers say. This relative size, more B. darlingHis extra-large molars and swollen cheeks made him worthy of his Tolkien-esque name, Atteberry said.
Like other condyloarthres, Beornus likely used his large, flat teeth to grind up plants, but he may also have occasionally eaten insects or another source of meat, the team wrote.
But Beornus was just one of the many small mammals that seem to have thrived after the dinosaurs fell.
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 condyloarthritis species hitherto unknown to science: Conacodon Hettingeri and Miniconus jeanninae.
The three newly described species were closely related, but had distinct differences in the shape and size of their teeth.
These condylarthres could help rewrite the history of the first mammals that populated North America after the dinosaurs became extinct, Atteberry said. Earlier studies of fauna from the first 320,000 years after this mass extinction suggested that mammals were still recovering and that individual families like condyloarthritis diversified very slowly.
“However, the earliest Paleocene fauna in the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming is a different story,” Atteberry said. “It has more diversity than we could predict for this time period, which suggests that we can’t really generalize the recovery of mammals after dinosaur extinction.”
In other words, Beorn and his friends may have been part of a thriving small mammal scene in the early Paleocene. These three species are part of a collection of some 420 mammal fossils found in the Great Divide Basin alone, and other species found from the same era are likely to appear there, the researchers said.
Perhaps these future fossil finds will find a place in Tolkien’s club as well.
More than two dozen extinct mammals have been named after Tolkien’s lore so far, including the weasel-like insectivore Bubogonia Bombadili (named after eccentric forest dweller Tom Bombadil) and canine ancestor Barophagous killer whale (named after the brutal humanoids that Tolkien’s work popularized).
Associated content:
10 extinct giants that once roamed North America
Photos: these mammal ancestors slipped from Jurassic trees
In pictures: the “Field guide” presents strange and magnificent prehistoric mammals
This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.
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