Want to learn more about the fossil history of South American mammals? Check out my blog, The Rafting Monkey. My posts discuss the latest research on South American mammals and fossil mammal sites as well as interesting tidbits from the archives of paleomammalogy. You can visit periodically to see what is new or sign up to get an email alert every […]
Do you know what a notoungulate is? How about an astrapothere, a necrolestid, or a sparassodont? These are just a few of the fascinating mammals that once called South America home. Unfortunately, these and many other ancient South American mammals left no living descendants and have no close living relatives. As a result, they are […]
One of the primary goals of field research is to document new species occurrences: discovering a new species or finding remains of a species where none had been found before. Most people think that naming a new species is the ultimate paleontological prize. Although finding and naming new species is an exciting and important part […]
Notoungulates – literally “southern ungulates.” – may be the most emblematic of all extinct South American mammals. Notoungulates were the most abundant of the native South American ungulates, and probably more species of notoungulates have been named than all other groups of endemic ungulates combined. The group includes more than 150 extinct genera in around a dozen families. Notoungulates lived […]
You can’t talk about fossils without talking about time, and mammalian paleontologists (also known as paleomammalogists) generally have two different ways to talk about how long ago an animal lived. The first way is to discuss age in terms of absolute time: saying a fossil is 25 million years old, for instance. The only way to […]
Want to learn more about the fossil history of South American mammals? Check out my blog, The Rafting Monkey. My posts discuss the latest research on South American mammals and fossil mammal sites as well as interesting tidbits from the archives of paleomammalogy. You can visit periodically to see what is new or sign up to get an email alert every […]
NEW BOOK: Horned Armadillos and Rafting Monkeys
Do you know what a notoungulate is? How about an astrapothere, a necrolestid, or a sparassodont? These are just a few of the fascinating mammals that once called South America home. Unfortunately, these and many other ancient South American mammals left no living descendants and have no close living relatives. As a result, they are […]
Notoungulates – literally “southern ungulates.” – may be the most emblematic of all extinct South American mammals. Notoungulates were the most abundant of the native South American ungulates, and probably more species of notoungulates have been named than all other groups of endemic ungulates combined. The group includes more than 150 extinct genera in around a dozen families. Notoungulates lived […]
You can’t talk about fossils without talking about time, and mammalian paleontologists (also known as paleomammalogists) generally have two different ways to talk about how long ago an animal lived. The first way is to discuss age in terms of absolute time: saying a fossil is 25 million years old, for instance. The only way to […]