KU researchers discover ‘big possum' that lived around 60 million years ago
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A team led by University of Kansas paleontologists has unearthed a giant prehistoric predator that once roamed the Earth not long after the dinosaurs went extinct.
According to a news release from KU, a species of Swaindelphys was found for the first time in Texas's Big Bend National Park; however, the environment in which it flourished during the Paleocene was very different from what exists today.
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The new species, Swaindelphys Solastella, is significantly larger than other Swaindelphys species that were known at the time.
The peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology published their report on the ancient species, which was enormous by Swaindelphys standards but still roughly the size of a modern hedgehog.
KU said the lead author of the report is a doctoral student at the university. Kristen Miller is a student in KU's Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum and spent a year studying specimens collected decades ago in West Texas by the late Judith Schiebout, a paleontologist whose career was spent at Louisiana State University.
According to a news release, Miller wanted to find out what kind of metatherians — the group that includes living marsupials and their extinct relatives — the Texas fossils represented.
'I compared them to a lot of other marsupials from around the same time period to see what they're most closely related to,' Miller said. 'It was a lot of morphological comparisons.'
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At first, the scientists believed the fossils were either the oldest of a group of Eocene metatherians that appeared a few million years later, or they were survivors of a group of large Cretaceous metatherians that somehow survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.
Both theories were ultimately proven incorrect by Miller's analysis. The Texas specimens belong to a 'surprisingly large' species of Swaindelphys.
'Not only are they the largest metatherians from this time period, but they're also the youngest and located at the most southern latitude,' Miller said.
'Since everything is bigger in Texas, this is perhaps not surprising.'
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