A Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientist identifies a new species of a mammal forerunner in a paper to be published today in the British journal Nature.
John Wible, curator of mammals at the museum, gave a name to the 75 million-year-old fossil of a shrew-like creature found in Mongolia in the paper titled "The Explosion of Present-day Placental Mammals."
"It is a new species, and that's always exciting because you get to name it," Wible said. He named the fossil Maelestes gobiensis because it was found in the Gobi Desert. "Lestes" means robber in Greek, and "MAE" honors the Mongolian American Expedition, which found the specimen 10 years ago.
Wible said that the creature was a little bigger than a short-tailed shrew, lived in leaf litter and ate worms and bugs.
"The teeth really say that this was a hungry bug-eater," he said.
The fossil of the skull and some other bones were set aside at the American Museum of Natural History in New York because it was not believed to be a new species. Wible noticed its unusual teeth and, recognizing it as something new, received permission to bring it to the Carnegie in 2003.
Other authors of the paper are Guillermo Rougier of the University of Louisville, Michael Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History and Robert Asher of the University of Cambridge.
