Coral Bluffs is a beautiful natural area in Colorado. It’s home to amazing birds, cool plants, awesome lizards… and a really rare fossil. Coral Bluffs was once a lush tropical landscape, home to palms and dinosaurs. Then they all went extinct…
Now a find being called “unprecedented” is shining a light on our earliest mammal ancestors to crawl out from under the dinosaurs. A Loxolophus skull shows one of the first mammals to start radiating into all the amazing mammals we know and love today, like me or a dog or a horse.
Dr. Tyler Lyson and Dr. Ian Miller of the Denver Museum of Nature & Sciences lead the team that made the amazing fossil find. The find was important enough to be published in Science magazine and to end up on a PBS special, The Rise of Mammals. That’s fairly impressive for a little mammal that was around some 300,000 years after the dinosaurs.
According to a press release:
“Thanks to the expertise, vision and grit of the scientific team, we are gaining a clearer understanding of how our modern world of mammals arose from the ashes of the dinosaurs,” said George Sparks, the Museum’s President and CEO. “We hope that this story inspires people – especially future generations – to follow their curiosity and contemplate the big questions our world presents to us.”
What’s the next impressive fossil find going to be? Tons of fossils have been found at Coral Bluffs and elsewhere, and ton are left to be found. Piecing together the history of the natural world is the bees knees… Uh, I mean the early placental mammals knees.
Know of any great recent scientific finds? Let Nerdbot know in the comments!
