Fossil shelved for a century reworks carnivore family tree
Wednesday, December 23, 2009 - 06:49
in Paleontology & Archaeology
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...