The animal the size of a rat was made with a mane of hair and thorns similar to those of the hedgehog, sharp teeth and digging legs like those of armadillos. The presence of thorns "makes it unique," says Romain Vullo, CNRS researcher who participated in the study. Indeed, to this day, the oldest spines found in mammals were older than 65 million years, says Le Monde.
The discovery of this fossil in 2011 in Las Hoyas is a major advance, says an international team of paleontologists published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The Spinolestes xenarthrosus is, in, fact, described as a new species of mammals belonging to the family of eutriconodontes, a line of extinct mammals at the end of the Mesozoic Era (-252.2 to - 66.0 million years ).
This conclusion was notably made possible by the excellent state of preservation of the fossil. "The animal was miraculously preserved. Not only the skeleton and teeth, which is classic, peeling, which is more rare, but still more exceptional, soft tissues, "says Romain Vullo the French daily. The fossil had, indeed, pulmonary bronchioles and liver remnants or "the oldest internal organs of mammals ever found," said Thomas Martin, a researcher at the University of Bonn, one of the study authors .
"We have conclusive evidence that several fundamental characteristics of mammals were already well established there 125 million years, to the time of dinosaurs," concludes Zhe-Xi Luo, a researcher at the University of Chicago, one of the authors of the 'study.
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