Posted on 06/05/2015 10:07:52 AM PDT by Red Badger
A fossilized skull and teeth from a newly described species of beaver that lived 28 million years ago have been unearthed in eastern Oregon.
The fossils worked their way out of the soil within a mile of the visitor center at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, said the monument's paleontologist, Joshua Samuels.
The find is significant, he said, because unlike the other species of ancient beavers found at the monument, this one appears related to the modern beaver, a symbol of Oregon found on the state flag. The others all went extinct.
The species is named Microtheriomys brevirhinus.
It was less than half the size of a modern beaver and related to beavers from Asia that crossed the Bering land bridge to North America about 7 million years ago, Samuels said.
It roamed what is now the monument during the Oligocene period, about 30 million years after the dinosaurs, along with three-toed horses, a two-horned rhinos, giant pigs, saber-tooths, rabbits and several species of dogs.
The fossils, and those of 20 other rodent species, were described in the May 15 edition of the journal Annals of Carnegie Museum.
University of Oregon paleontologist Samantha Hopkins said in an email it will be exciting to analyze the find in an evolutionary framework.
"While there is relatively little castorid (beaver species) diversity today, there are hundreds of species (many of which are really important members of their faunal communities) in the fossil record of the Northern Hemisphere, and a better understanding of their diversity and evolutionary relationships has a lot to tell us about processes driving mammalian evolution over the last 40 million years," she wrote.
Samuels said the age of the beaver fossils was deduced by their location between two layers of volcanic ash that have been dated from radioactive isotopes.
"We've got badlands exposures here," he said. "As they get wet, whenever it rains or snows and the temperature heats or cools, the claystone these things are in shrinks and swells. The bones are pushed out. The rock breaks apart. The fossils are exposed. This one just came out of the ground it was preserved in."
Fossils from nearly 100 species of mammals have been found on the monument, Samuels said.
No beaver repellant?......................
Well I have a couple...
...a 44-40...
a 7.62x56...
a 30.06...
and several 5.56.
Its hard chemically repel 1000 acres.
Any kid that brings me a beaver off our land gets a crisp $20 bill... even though most kids where I’m from would do it for fun.
What are Beaver pelts going for nowadays?.......................
Microtheriomys brevirhinus... was less than half the size of a modern beaver and related to beavers from Asia that crossed the Bering land bridge to North America about 7 million years ago... during the Oligocene period, about 30 million years after the dinosaurs, along with three-toed horses, a two-horned rhinos, giant pigs, saber-tooths, rabbits and several species of dogs. The fossils, and those of 20 other rodent species, were described in the May 15 edition of the journal Annals of Carnegie Museum... the age of the beaver fossils was deduced by their location between two layers of volcanic ash that have been dated from radioactive isotopes.I didn't take the time to check to see if the moron patrol had stopped in to claim that, since radiocarbon dating only goes back 50,000 years, how can these dates have been figured out. Not only is radiocarbon dating not mentioned in the article, that particular red herring has been cooked down into fish sauce many times, even here on FR.
LOL!
LOL!
LOL!
Dam.
LOL!
I hate you!
Mr. Moron, you were a little hard on the Beaver . . .
That sounds like some kind of tail.
I own a small lake and land in a new association community. When new roads were installed, some changes occurred in the drainage of the lake and part of the water was lost. EPA had put painted rebar around the edges of the lake. A beaver came along and rebuilt the dam where it had been damaged by the road builders, and the water came back up to the level marked by the rebar. Then the heavy spring rains scared the other owners who were afraid the lake would flood over the dam road. So they live trapped the beaver and moved it far away and tore out the beaver dam, and my lake is now half the size it should be which it was when I bought it. I WANT MY BEAVER BACK!!! Now I have to do the hard work of building a real dam. Damn. ;-)
I forgot to mention this beaver did not build one of those log and branch huts in the middle of the lake, it dug a hideaway in a steep bank which became visible when the water level dropped.
ground hog
While the groundhog is a member of the rodent family, it is more closely related to a beaver or a squirrel. And like the beaver, groundhogs’ front teeth are ever-growing; meaning groundhogs must constantly be gnawing to keep them the right length.
having said all that, truth that it is, the picture is still of a ground hog, not a beaver
Did you really have to post the attention-starved eunuch???
Post #24 deserves an “abuse” complaint.
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