Fossil Mammals

Notoungulata

Notoungulata

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 […]

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Time and “Land Mammal Ages”

Time and “Land Mammal Ages”

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 […]

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Basal Notoungulates (Henricosborniidae, Notostylopidae)

Basal Notoungulates (Henricosborniidae, Notostylopidae)

The basal notoungulate families Henricosborniidae and Notostylopidae are mainly known from Eocene fossil sites. Henricosborniids have also been identified from at least one Paleocene site (Tiupampa), and notostylopids survived into the early Oligocene based on a recently named species from Chile, Chilestylops davidsoni (Bradham et al. 2015). The cheek teeth of notostylopids are rather distinctive (see Simpson 1948 for […]

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Mesotheriidae

Mesotheriidae

Mesotheriids, more commonly known as mesotheres, have been known to science longer than almost any other group of notoungulates. The first mesotheriid, Mesotherium, was named by Serres in 1867. At that time, only the toxodontids Toxodon and Nesodon had been named and described. Mesotherium was named “middle beast” in reference to Serres’ belief that it represented an evolutionary intermediate […]

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Interatheriidae

Interatheriidae

The Interatheriidae (interatheres) are perhaps the most successful group of notoungulates; they are the longest-ranging of all notoungulate families, and nearly two dozen genera have been described (though it is unclear how many of these are valid). Moreover, interatheriids are often very abundant in the faunas in which they are found, suggesting high population densities; […]

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Digging for Fossils

Digging for Fossils

When I tell people I am a paleontologist and that I go out on “digs,” they usually think I spend most of the trip literally digging in one place for fossils. This happens occasionally but is not typical of my fieldwork. Most of my time in the field is spent looking for fossils; relatively little […]

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