LiveScience has a post about a strange mammal from Madagascar. This mammal, called Adalatherium hui, lived about 66 million years ago in what is now northwestern Madagascar. This was the very last of the Cretaceous Period and just before the K-Pg mass extinction. The new fossil is the oldest and only nearly complete specimen of an extinct group known as Gondwanatherians. Its has been described in a paper in the journal Nature.
The fossil is from northwestern Madagascar and dates back 66 million years, to the end of the Cretaceous period. Madagascar was already an island at the time, having drifted away from Africa by 88 million years ago, and the animals that lived there were completely bizarre, said David Krause, the senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who led the new research.
Among the animals found on Madagascar at this time were: the predatory, buck-toothed dinosaur Masiakasaurus knopfleri; a frog wider than a No. 2 pencil is long that may have eaten baby dinosaurs and was named Beelzebufo ampinga, or "devil frog"; and a crocodile with a short snout and bumpy teeth that probably ate plants.
"We actually think we had an herbivorous crocodile, and it doesn't get much weirder than that," Krause said during a press briefing.
