Researchers discover three new species of extinct South American marsupials| # 14078 | 8 years ago on Tue, Apr 11 2017 at 5:14 pm |
FatherOfEl
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How about this?! The discovery of three extinct species and new insights to a fourth indicates a little-known family of marsupials, the Palaeothentidae, was diverse and existed over a wide range of South America as recent as 13 million years ago. Article: user link on phys.org Um... so, yeah. "If you don't make mistakes you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake." -- Frank Wilczek |
| # 14081 | 8 years ago on Wed, Apr 12 2017 at 2:56 am |
Doitsujin
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Bonn
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Here's the thing: we tend to associate marsupials with Australia (in part because they have such iconic marsupials like kangaroos and koalas), and folks in North America will know the opossum, but there's also marsupials in South America, and they do have a (pre-)history there (notably around the same time as these newly-discovered critters, during the Miocene, there was a saber-toothed marsupial called Thylacosmilus |
| # 14087 | 8 years ago on Wed, Apr 12 2017 at 1:35 pm |
Jovian
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Jupiter
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For some reason, I imagine a saber-billed platypus.
It was my understanding that marsupials were present on every continent except Antarctica. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. -- Carl Sagan |
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).