Now Emry, Boyd, and colleagues have completed what’s taken nearly 80 years to uncover, publishing their description of the animal in the Journal of Vertebrae Paleontology. Only, Tedford passed away in 2011 and the project was left unfinished. “Tedford realized for decades that there was an important, undescribed species at Fitterer Ranch that could provide important insight into arctoid evolution if they could just get a good enough specimen out of the ground,” says North Dakota Geological Survey paleontologist Clint Boyd. The animal appeared to be an arctoid, which is a broad group of mammals more closely related to dogs than cats. Then in 1982 a field crew led by paleontologist Robert Emry at long last found the elusive fossil-a nearly complete skeleton of the small carnivore.Īt the time, Emry and paleontologist Richard Tedford, an expert on fossil carnivores, had planned to describe the skeleton. Every time paleontologists returned to the site, they hoped they would find more of the animal in the ancient rock. Field expeditions to the Fitterer Ranch fossil site in North Dakota started to turn up the busted-up, bizarre jaws of some kind of carnivorous mammal back in the 1940s. It’s taken paleontologists decades to untangle the identity of Eoarctos. ![]() ![]() Named Eoactos vorax by paleontologists, the fossil mammal helps reveal how the group containing skunks, raccoons, bears, and even seals got their start some 32 million years ago, as the age of mammals entered full swing. One of the earliest relatives of bears looked less like a grizzly and more like a raccoon with a fondness for crushing snail shells.
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