Washington: Researchers have discovered an ancient kitten-sized predator that lived in Bolivia about 13 million years ago - one of the smallest species reported in the extinct order Sparassodonta.
Third-year undergraduate student Russell Engelman and Case Western Reserve anatomy professor Darin Croft made the finding by analyzing a partial skull that had been in a University of Florida collection more than three decades.
Engelman, an evolutionary biology major from Russell Township, Ohio, said the animal would have been about the size of a marten, a catlike weasel found in the Northeastern United States and Canada, and probably filled the same ecological niche.
The researchers refrained from naming the new species mainly because the specimen lackswell-preserved teeth, which are the only parts preserved in many of its close relatives.
The skull, which would have been a little less than 3 inches long if complete, shows the animal had a very short snout.
A socket, or alveolus, in the upper jaw shows it had large, canines, that were round in cross-section much like those of a meat-eating marsupial, called the spotted-tailed quoll, found in Australia today, the researchers said.
Although sparassodonts are more closely related to modern opossums than cats and dogs, the group included saber-toothed species that fed on large prey. This small Bolivian species probably fed on the ancient relatives of today`s guinea pigs and spiny rats, the researchers said.
The specimen was found in a mountainous site known as Quebrada Honda, Bolivia, in 1978, in rock layers dated 12 million to 13 million years ago.
Structurally, extinct meat-eating opossums and sparassodont skulls share a number of similarities due to their similar meat-eating diet, Engelman said.
The findings have been published online in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
