New Zealand's First Land Mammal Discovered

Bob Beale writes to clue us to big news from New Zealand. The country has long been thought to have been devoid of land mammals until recent times. No mammal fossils had ever been found there; but now one has. From the article: "Small but remarkable fossils found in New Zealand will prompt a major rewrite of prehistory textbooks, showing for the first time that the so-called 'land of birds' was once home to mammals as well. The tiny fossilized bones — part of a jaw and hip — belonged to a unique, mouse-sized land animal unlike any other mammal known... The fact that even one land mammal had lived there, at least 16 million years ago, has put paid to the theory that New Zealand's rich bird fauna had evolved there because they had no competition from land mammals."

Comments

Re: Birds hunting off-shore

[TheNicestGuy]

Not likely. The article is placing this fossil around 16 mya (million years ago), while New Zealand was as isolated from all other landmasses as it is today by 60 mya at the latest. Unless that hunting bird had a range as wide as the Tasman Sea (about 2,000 km), it couldn't have gone off-shore to get mammals.

Full article available via PNAS as 'open access'

[Buran]

I work at a major medical school in the U.S., and so the first thing I did when I read the linked article (I know, I know, GASP!) was find out what journal this was published in -- we have online subscriptions to hundreds of journals, so surely I could go to the primary source. PNAS considers this important enough that it has the article tagged as "open access" -- free for all to read.

Miocene mammal reveals a Mesozoic ghost lineage on insular New Zealand, southwest Pacific -- Worthy et al., 10.1073/pnas.0605684103 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The abstract is standard HTML, but the full article is in PDF format (link to the full article PDF).

Citation:

Worthy, T. H., A. J. Tennyson, M. Archer, A. M. Musser, S. J. Hand, C. Jones, B. J. Douglas, J. A. McNamara and R. M. Beck (2006). Miocene mammal reveals a Mesozoic ghost lineage on insular New Zealand, southwest Pacific. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.

(no volume or page numbers as this article has not yet been published in print).

Bats

[Mercedes308]

New Zealand has two species of native bats, would they count as mammals?

Not quite correct

[Anonymous Coward]

The country has long been thought to have been devoid of land mammals until recent times.

There were and still are in New Zealand a few species of bat that walk around on the ground (I'm not making this up), who flew over from Australia without human introduction.

Re:Interesting. (Obligatory eyebrow raise.)

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an alternative available. The "Pukeko" is a common bird in New Zealand, and they are very poor flyers - certainly not capable of flying from Australia, where they evolved (They are the Australian "Swamp Hen") and yet they florish in New Zealand. They have only been here for a few thousand years. The best theory is that they came across on flotsam ejected from rivers during large storm events in Australia.

The Pukeko's (Australian Purple Swamphen) being a poor flier is an urban legend. They're excellent long-distance fliers and introduced themselves to other islands too, they just prefer to walk most of the time and are clumsy on the wing. The Australian Purple Swamphen migrated to New Zealand a very long time ago; the Takehe merely is a New Zealand-adapted Purple Swamphen.

Re:Interesting. (Obligatory eyebrow raise.)

[mudshark]

Pukeko are hell on mice, or anything that will fit in their beaks for that matter. They're quite effective hunters, as anyone who has free-roaming poultry in rural NZ will attest. So maybe that's where the little furry buggers went.

Re:I disagree

[Artifakt]

Scientists tend to reject remote chances near automatically when it comes to fossils. Since only about 1 creature in 100 million or so ever gets found in fossil form (addmitedly a rough average), the odds of that also being a 1 in 100 million exception for other reasons become very much astronomical (or even just a one in a million chance does). If we have only 6 Foobarasaurus Smex fossils that are close enough to full skeletons to judge size well, and there were probably 600 million of them during the whole time the species was around, what are the odds that one of those six is the biggest single specimen that ever lived? In the same way, what are the odds that one of those six died from being struck by lightning?