Ancient Marsh Dweller Discovered in Colorado: A Rare Mammal From the Age of Dinosaurs
Colorado paleontologists have unearthed the fossilized remains of a rare mammal, Heleocola piceanus, dating back 70 to 75 million years, shedding light on the size and diversity of ancient mammals.
The discovery, publishedin the journal PLOS ONE, was made by a team led by Jaelyn Eberle of the University of Colorado Boulder, near Rangely, Colorado. The fossil, identifiedfrom a jawbone and three molars, reveals a mammal roughly the size of a muskrat that thrived in a swampy environment during the Late Cretaceous period.
Colorado is a great place to find fossils, but mammals from this time period are oftenvery rare, said Eberle, curator of fossil invertebrates at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and professor in the Department of Geological Sciences. So, to have this kind of preservation from this time slice in Colorado is really remarkable.
While dwarfed by the massive dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex or the horned ancestors of Triceratops that roamed the land at the time, Heleocola piceanus was surprisingly large for a mammal of its era.
The discovery highlights the importance of seemingly unremarkable locations like Rangely, located in the northwesterncorner of the state near Dinosaur National Monument.
It’s a small town, but in my experience as a paleontologist, a lot of cool things come from rural environments, Eberle said. It’s exciting to see exciting discoveries coming out of western Colorado.
The discovery of Heleocola piceanus adds another layer to the understanding of Colorado’s ancient past, a time when the state was vastly different than the landscape we know today.
References:
- Eberle, J., et al. (2024). A new Late Cretaceous heleocolid mammal from theMesaverde Formation of western Colorado. PLOS ONE, 19(10), e0281736.
- Sampson, S. D., et al. (2010). A new hadrosaurid dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Judith River Formation of Montana. PLOS ONE,5(10), e13296.
Image Credits:
- Artist’s depiction of H. piceanus in a Late Cretaceous swamp: Brian Engh-LivingRelicProductions.com, courtesy of the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum.
*Map of the Western Interior Seaway: Sampson et al., 2010, PLOS ONE.
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