Some time when I was young I read an account of the Pleistocene megafauna that roamed the earth up until about 10-12,000 years ago. Ever since then the image of “beavers the size of bears” has been lodged in my imagination. Now comes word that, shades of Rocky and Bullwinkle, we had sabre-toothed squirrels to keep the beaver-bears company. At least in my dreams because, according to an article in New Scientist magazine, these guys were companions of the dinosaurs rather than the megafauna, but still:
Truth is sometimes just as strange as fiction. Palaeontologists have unearthed fossils of a bizarre mammal that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs and was a dead ringer for the sabre-toothed squirrel star of the computer-animated Ice Age films.
[The squirrel fossil] was dug out of rocks rich in the remains of giant sauropod and theropod dinosaurs. Its large eye sockets indicate it was possibly nocturnal, says Christian de Muizon at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, who was not a member of Rougier’s team. “The function of the long canines is difficult to assess,” says Rougier. “There is no real modern model for that.”…The shape of the squirrel’s molars suggests that it may have had a taste for insects…
Read the full post here.