A new fossil discovery from China shows that a tiny squirrel-like creature glided through the air during the age of dinosaurs, more than 75 million years earlier than scientists had documented that ability in a mammal.
The creature might have even beaten birds into the air.
Like today's flying squirrels, it stretched a furry membrane between its limbs to provide an airfoil for gliding after it jumped from a tree. But it's not related to anything living today.
Scientists don't know exactly when the animal lived. Its remains could be anywhere from 130 million to 164 million years old, said Jin Meng of the American Museum of Natural History. He and colleagues from Beijing report the discovery in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
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Still, added to a recent find in the same locale in northeastern China that revealed a semi-aquatic creature, the discovery shows that early mammals were a lot more varied than the land-loving creatures scientists have traditionally envisioned, Meng said.
The Mesozoic ecology gets kewler and kewler as far as I am concerned. Mammals look like they played a very important part in the ecology. One that's much different than what's traditionally protrayed. It also explains why the mammals survived the KT boundary: they had a lot of alternate morphological strategies to exploit. That's a post for another time though. I still need to finish the PT Event posts before I go there!
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