More than a hundred years after its discovery, the limbs and vertebrae of a fossil have been pulled off the shelf at the American Museum of Natural History to revise the view of early carnivore lifestyles. Carnivores—currently a diverse group of mostly meat-eating mammals like bears, cats, raccoons, seals, and hyenas—had been considered arboreal in their early evolutionary history. But now that the skeleton of 'Miacis' uintensis has been unpacked from its matrix of sandstone, it is clear that some early carnivores were built to walk on the ground at least part of the time. The new research is published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
"Carnivores are highly varied today, and they were also very diverse in the past," says lead author Michelle Spaulding, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and the Museum. "Examination of this fossil tells us that they were not all sitting in trees, looking down. 'M.' uintensis did not have a lot of adaptations for an arboreal lifestyle."
"It is typically thought that the miacoids of the Eocene—the basal fossil relatives of modern Carnivora that root the family tree—were arboreal," concurs co-author John Flynn, Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals at the Museum. "But we now are beginning to see that there was a greater diversity of locomotor styles in early carnivores."
'M.' uintensis was discovered on an American Museum of Natural History expedition in 1894 among the brown and red sandstones of the White River beds in Utah. Paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, who first named the iconic dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor mongoliensis, described the teeth of the newly discovered mammal carnivore species in a Museum monograph the following year. The specimen dates to 39-42 million years ago.
blah. New Meeting day.
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