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Meet the Saber-Toothed Squirrel

Posted by samzenpus on from the we're-going-to-need-a-bigger-acorn dept.

sciencehabit writes "Researchers have discovered the fossil remains of a 94-million-year-old squirrel-like critter with a long, narrow snout and a pair of curved saber-fangs that it would have likely used to pierce its insect prey. The creature, pieced together from skull fragments unearthed in Argentina and dubbed Cronopio dentiacutus, was not ancestral to us or any living mammal. Instead, it belonged to an extinct group called dryolestoids, a cadre of fuzzy mammals that scurried about in the shadow of long-necked dinosaurs."

59 comments

  1. Did they find? by camperdave · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did they find it clutching a fossilized acorn?

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    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    1. Re:Did they find? by bryan1945 · · Score: 1

      Darn you beat me to it! Love that little guy.

      --
      Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
    2. Re:Did they find? by owlstead · · Score: 2

      No, it is actually *in the article* that it didn't.

    3. Re:Did they find? by Cryacin · · Score: 2

      You must be a real hoot at parties.

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    4. Re:Did they find? by owlstead · · Score: 1

      Don't feel bad, the subtitle and of course the article beat both of you to it....

    5. Re:Did they find? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it was clutching fucknuts?

    6. Re:Did they find? by jd · · Score: 1

      I think it's owls that hoot. Squirrels make more of a chittering sound.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    7. Re:Did they find? by jd · · Score: 1

      Bah. Just noticed the username. Never mind.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    8. Re:Did they find? by Gilmoure · · Score: 1

      I think it couldn't find any fucknuts. It had to wait for SlashDot to be invented.

      --
      I drank what? -- Socrates
    9. Re:Did they find? by wallsg · · Score: 1

      No, it is actually *in the article* that it didn't.

      On Slashdot that's the best place to hide something that you don't want read...

    10. Re:Did they find? by RockDoctor · · Score: 1
      Happens to the best of us.

      (I was thinking of making a comment too, since I go by the nickname of "Wol" in Real Life (TM). So your trip up saved me <G>.)

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  2. Bah! by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

    I'll bet this one didn't "scurry about". Probably the dinosaurs scurried away whenever it came out of its den looking hungry.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    1. Re:Bah! by black6host · · Score: 1

      With a skull about an inch long, I doubt it.

    2. Re:Bah! by R3d+M3rcury · · Score: 2

      Oh, it's just a harmless little squirrel, isn't it? Well, it's always the same. But do they listen to me?

      Those dinosaurs better not risk a frontal assault. That squirrel's dynamite!

      (ref)

    3. Re:Bah! by owlstead · · Score: 1

      Of course it scurried, it could get up to 94 million years old. I'll see how well you run after reaching that age.

    4. Re:Bah! by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 1

      Of course, we have no way of knowing if it is venomous.

    5. Re:Bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Watch out for stobor.

    6. Re:Bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'll bet that the specimen is not native to the area, it was almost certainly carried there by a swallow.

    7. Re:Bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      African or European swallow ?

    8. Re:Bah! by craigminah · · Score: 0

      The only venomous mammal is the platypus.

    9. Re:Bah! by Gilmoure · · Score: 1

      *golf clap*

      --
      I drank what? -- Socrates
    10. Re:Bah! by MaskedSlacker · · Score: 1

      And, presumably, at least some of it's extinct ancestors, and their extinct relatives. Who knows how far back mammalian venom goes?

    11. Re:Bah! by Uncle+Warthog · · Score: 1

      The only venomous mammal is the platypus.

      That's funny, I don't remember my lawyer as having webbed feet or a bill........

    12. Re:Bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How am I supposed to know that?

    13. Re:Bah! by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 1

      And shrews, and Cuban Solenodons, and European moles

    14. Re:Bah! by oldmac31310 · · Score: 1

      Oh, I remember the bill alright...

      --
      http://www.acetonestudio.com
  3. Already Discovered in Tennessee! by Mister+Transistor · · Score: 2

    Yes, it's called a Jackalope - did it have antlers, too?

    --
    -- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
    1. Re:Already Discovered in Tennessee! by Loligo · · Score: 1

      Such a dumb name. Anyone that's ever seen one knows they're clearly jackadeer.

  4. Link-whore headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    There's no more or less relation to squirrels than any other modern rodent-like mammal. This isn't science, it's marketing.

    1. Re:Link-whore headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Indeed. And if the artist's rendition is anything to go by (which it probably isn't) it looks more like a shrew than a squirrel.

    2. Re:Link-whore headline by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      This rendition?

      http://images.wikia.com/iceage/images/3/39/65.jpg

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  5. :D by buanzo · · Score: 1

    Argentina! Argentina! Argentina! Argentina! Couldn't help it. Sorry guys. Live long and prosper.

    --
    Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
    1. Re::D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We've got better dinosaurs too

      link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giganotosaurus

    2. Re::D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      peronists? Italian beer-drinkers?

    3. Re::D by mruizcamauer · · Score: 1

      And of course the K govt will say its only 8 yrs old, not 94M, and they are responsible for finding it....

  6. Scrat lives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Peter de Sève beat them to it.

  7. why is it compared to a squirrel? by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    looks like a weasel with ever so slightly longer teeth

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:why is it compared to a squirrel? by jc42 · · Score: 1

      Yeah; a quick google shows that it's classified in the extinct superorder Dryolestoidea, which has an unclear relationship to modern mammals. It certainly wasn't a rodent, which are in the Euarchontoglires superorder. The rodents themselves split off from that branch a few tens of millions of years later.

      This sort of bizarre misclasification, apparently for the thrill of being able to write "sabre-toothed squirrel", doesn't exactly give a lot of credibility to the article's author.

      The most appropriate response to this is probably "WTF is this doing on a news-for-nerds site?"

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    2. Re:why is it compared to a squirrel? by jd · · Score: 1

      It's unclear and therefore the superorder (which is morphic, not genetic, and therefore almost certainly wrong -- traditional classifications tend not to hold up under genetic scrutiny) is immaterial.

      Second, it's on here because it's a discovery of a new species. That's a particularly interesting part of science. Linking it with squirrels was no worse a travesty than chaos mathematicians linking storms and butterflies, and certainly no worse than plasma physicists talking of sausage instabilities. Nobody is trying to forecast the weather by studying insects and nobody is trying to cook breakfast in a nuclear fusion facility. I'll agree that Joe Average might be confused, but Joe Average certainly has no business being on a news-for-nerds site.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    3. Re:why is it compared to a squirrel? by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      Nobody said it was a travesty. I just think it's weird and couldn't understand the logical reasoning behind the article's catchy title.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    4. Re:why is it compared to a squirrel? by jd · · Score: 1

      The logic is easy. Nobody reads the Firehose, so only catchy titles ever get spotted, and even fewer submit stories in the first place. (It's complex. Or, in some cases, wholly imaginary.)

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    5. Re:why is it compared to a squirrel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's unclear and therefore the superorder (which is morphic, not genetic, and therefore almost certainly wrong -- traditional classifications tend not to hold up under genetic scrutiny) is immaterial.

      Tut tut. As a paleontologist who has to rely on morphological data for systematics, I think not so much! The relationships here were supported by a morphological cladistics analysis with more than 300 characters. Sure, not as great as molecular phylogenetics, but I think we should be very much shocked if it turned out it was actually a relative of the true squirrel. Perhaps it may be more meaningful to talk about what it had in common with 'squirrels'... which appears to have just been that it was a similar sized mammal. Given the post-cranial skeleton isn't known, we don't even know if it had a bushy squirrel tail!

      They could have called it a "saber-toothed rat" and have been just as correct.

      And anyway, I really doubt that "traditional" (Linnean?) systematics is all bad. I'd bet that if one compared what we thought we knew about relationships in 1960 with what we know about relationships among organisms today, we would find that many of the relationships have held up, more or less. Some small minority of inferred relationships have radically changed, but things haven't so radically changed as you suggest because of molecular phylogenetics.

    6. Re:why is it compared to a squirrel? by jd · · Score: 1

      "Saber-toothed rat" part:

      Agreed completely on two grounds. Rats, even the extinct 0.75 tonne ones, are closely related to squirrels so no matter what method you use you will get about the same distance to this new species and therefore you can pick either. However, your point (I think) is that the relationship is so distant from any extant small mammals that you can still pick any of them with a roughly equal probability of picking the one that actually is the closest. I can buy that.

      General Sciency part:

      Morphological data is often all paleontologists have to go on (although you CAN extract spider and brewing yeast DNA from 45 million year old amber), so in such cases there simply isn't a choice. You have to go with that because there's nothing else to go by. Well, not unless you've a handy TARDIS or other time machine.

      The relationship that you're talking about tells us structurally how things relate. It can be used to build up a reasonable tree showing where the relationships coming from. I say "can" because, as you know, the early family tree of birds is highly contentious due to the question of which changes are considered important and which are not. You get very different trees according to how you divide the characteristics up. A morphological tree, then, is most useful when there's no ambiguity. Ambiguity is always a warning sign that there's insufficient data leading to multiple possible scenarios.

      Let's assume that we have a good tree, though. What can we infer from it, beyond where species divided off? Not as much as we'd like. We know that a morphological change is caused by a genetic change, but not all genetic changes lead to morphological changes and equal-sized genetic changes can produce unequal-sized morphological changes. As a result, having the tree gives us plenty of constraints on the relationship between two species and it gives us a specific number of parameters, but it doesn't give us values for any of them.

      Specific to this Post Part:

      It's extremely hard to say what is meant by "relative" in this context. If you mean "this species isn't a direct ancestor of squirrels" then I'd say you're absolutely correct. If you mean "the order to which this species belongs is not directly connected to any part of the ancestral lineage of squirrels" then I'm happy to accept that at face value. If you mean "the last common ancestor between this and squirrels pre-dates other branches from either lineage that survive today and are not considered related", again I'm happy to accept that. In other words, anything that treats the tree as a genealogical map and considers Nth cousins for some accepted value of N as being "related" and nothing else is probably going to say these species are unrelated.

      From a molecular standpoint, things get more complex. In terms of the genetics, it is technically wrong to depict all morphological branches as being at equal angles from the lineage they branch from, as we simply don't know how many evolutionary steps were taken for the changes to become visible. It might be one, it might be a million. But because rock doesn't preserve DNA too well, we have no way of knowing which end of the spectrum things are. Hence, the simplest option is to assume that the average will be about the same as you can't really do otherwise.

      The practical upshot is that if we take the morphological tree, some branches may be squished together and others may be much further apart than the morphology alone would suggest. So, if you define "relative" as being "within a certain distance" on the tree in a straight line rather than as a count of branchings (ie: the genetic distance falls below G, where G is some threshold for what is considered related), you can guarantee you'll get very different results than from the morphological genealogy. What you can't do is say in which direction and therefore you can't say (for fossils, at least) what the straight-line distance is and therefore cannot say how closely related something is at the molecular level

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      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  8. Already discovered in Argentina! by flyhigher · · Score: 0

    Not necessarily an extinct species. A very similar living specimen was found -- and killed after attacking Special Forces troops in Argentina.

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1nRBU-FO8-Y/SEcWarbBrOI/AAAAAAAABkE/r1vIj1WYPEQ/s400/ATT00001.jpg

  9. All you can state are probabilities. by jd · · Score: 1

    Tsk! We don't know the genetic distance between this species and squirrels, all you can say is that squirrels aren't direct ancestors and therefore the genetic distance can't be any less than that between squirrels and the common ancestor of all modern rodentia. It can certainly be smaller than the genetic distance between squirrels and rodent-like animals that provably have a TMRCA of comparable age - mammals were quite diverse 94 million yeas ago and this new species may well be from a sub-branch off the branch that eventually became squirrels. Nothing in TFA to prohibit that, although it's a little unlikely.

    You stating certainties where you have none is a far worse example of KWing than the headline.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  10. In other news by jd · · Score: 1

    An extinct giant short-faced bear that went extinct 5 million years ago would have put up a decent fight against Secret Squirrel here. "Our analyses show that it had the most powerful bite of any known terrestrial mammal determined thus far," Dr Wroe told BBC Nature.

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    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:In other news by Ol+Biscuitbarrel · · Score: 1

      The North American giant short-faced bear, Arctodus simus, was actually larger, from what I've gathered, and went extinct only 11kya. Maybe it couldn't have bit through a fire hydrant but a 3.5k lb bear 6 ft high at the snout is crazy enough for me.

    2. Re:In other news by jd · · Score: 1

      Biting through fire hydrants is terrible, though. You've got to think of the dogs!

      Ok, seriously, yes. I wouldn't have wanted to have met any of the ancient bears. Even the European Cave bear was lethal and psychotic. Nothing after that point matters, unless you're into making slasher horror films and want to make them biologically correct.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  11. 34th rule by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So, how long will it take to become rule 34'd by furries?

  12. Terra Nova by jameskojiro · · Score: 1

    When do we get this little critter be a pet for one of the humans on the show Terra Nova, or do the idiot science advisers have no clue that mammals even existed 85 million years ago...

    The forests should be chock full of little mammals scurrying about here and there.

    No, they just want top show us the cool and awesome dinosaurs.

    --
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    1. Re:Terra Nova by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      That would be because Terra Nova shows on Fox, and Fox has nothing to do with science :)

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      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  13. They are alive and well... by Nyder · · Score: 1

    ... as a mount in Everquest 2. Have to buy it off the Station Market though.

    Yes, it's saber tooth and will pull out an acorn to chew on.

    --
    Be seeing you...
  14. Not a squirrel, a FERRET! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...event though this is some ancester to mammals, it looks more like a ferret than a squirrel.

  15. As a matter of fact... by Dogbertius · · Score: 1

    They did!

  16. When I read about a saber toothed squirrel... by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    On reading about this thing, I can't help but imagine a squirrel yelling "BERSERKER CLAW!" as it tears some hapless creature apart.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  17. Just that they do not look like squirrels by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The look more like a bandicoot with the long pointed snout and squirrels have rounded heads