Paleontologists from Dinosaur National Monument and Utah State Parks were part of the research team to share the news of a new gigantic mammal fossil that dwarfs other mammals of its time. A press release from Utah State Parks describes the teeth and jaw found near the Colorado-Utah border in 2016 during the preparation of a rock from a site near Rangely, Colorado. The molars were found to be nearly 5 times larger than typical mammal teeth found from the Cretaceous Period of 72 million years ago. Most mammals of this time were about chipmunk size while this “swamp dweller” is huge in comparison. “The region might have looked a bit like Louisiana,” shares study co-author ReBecca Hunt-Foster, park paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument. “We see a lot of animals that were living in the water quite happily, like sharks, rays, and guitarfish.” Hunt-Foster and study co-author John Foster of the Utah Field House have been working in northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah to dig up Cretaceous fossils every summer for about 15 years. Their findings were published on October 23rd in PLOS ONE journal.
Link: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310948
