- A mammal that lived 66 million years ago has been called a “crazy beast” because of its extremely bizarre makeup.
- The creature is like a random assortment of body parts from other animals and has teeth that no one has seen before.
- The discovery and classification of the creature is the subject of a new paper published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Often, when paleontologists study the remains of an ancient creature, they have a pretty good idea of its offspring from the moment they look at it. In fact, some new species are so similar to creatures that are already in the scientific record that researchers spend months or even years researching the smallest differences to correctly identify a new species. In the case of an ancient mammal named AdalatheriumDetermining that it was a new species was fairly straightforward, but understanding its place in the massive tree of life was still a challenge.
You see, the animal is such a strange mixture of traits from other species that finding out where they fit in the mammal world took a long time. In fact, some of the animal’s characteristics have left researchers still scratching their heads.
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Adalatherium, which translates as “crazy beast”, was originally from Madagascar. Madagascar is well known for its incredibly interesting and diverse wildlife, and this trend seems to go back about 66 million years. The work of years of study of the creature was presented in a paper in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The strange combination of features of the animal begins with its legs. The hind legs are “stretched” in a way that you might think of a lizard, while its forelimbs were held close to the body. The hind legs were muscular and strong, with strong claws, while the front legs were thin and weak.
“Adalatherium is simply strange,” Dr. Simone Hoffmann, co-author of the research, said in a statement. “Trying to find out how it moved, for example, was a challenge, because our front-end tells us a completely different story than its back-end.”
Things get even more bizarre when you look at his teeth. The front teeth of the creature were similar to those of a rodent in that they were constantly growing, meant to shrink over time. Meanwhile, the teeth at the back of his jaws were simply strange and unlike anything scientists have ever seen. In fact, the researchers said that if only the back teeth had been discovered, no one would have ever known what animal they came from. They are that unique.
If nothing else, the discovery and work to identify this “crazy beast” is proof that there are still so many creatures waiting to be found, and some of them are truly unique.