A fossil of the oldest known ancestor of modern rats — an agile creature that could climb, burrow and eat just about anything — has been unearthed in China, scientists said Thursday.<\/p>\n
The newly named species Rugosodon eurasiaticus had flexible ankles for tree-climbing and sharp teeth that could gnaw both animals and plants, according to the U.S. journal Science.<\/p>\n
These adaptations helped the ancient rat-like rodents known as multituberculates become among the longest lived mammals in history, said the study led by Chong-Xi Yuan from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing.<\/p>\n
Believed to originate 160 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, they lived for some 100 million years in the age of the dinosaurs before modern rodents overcame them.<\/p>\n
Their abilities also led to their evolution and diversification into a range of tree-dwelling and plant-eating mammals that followed, said the researchers from China and the United States.<\/p>\n
“Some could jump, some could burrow, others could climb trees and many more lived on the ground,” said co-author Zhe-Xi Luo of the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n
“The tree-climbing multituberculates and the jumping multituberculates had the most interesting ankle bones, capable of ‘hyper-back-rotation’ of the hind feet.”<\/p>\n
The latest fossil was found in the Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation in eastern China.<\/p>\n
Its name comes from the Latin “rugosus” for wrinkles and “odon” for tooth, because of its bumpy molar surface and “eurasiaticus” for its widespread territory.<\/p>\n
Luo said the fossil is similar to those found in Portugal, suggesting that it and its relatives were widely found across the entire Eurasian continent.<\/p>\n
The creature was believed to have a body mass of about 65 to 80 grams (2.3-2.8 ounces).<\/p>\n
Researchers said the tooth and ankle adaptations likely evolved very early in the creatures’ existence, helping them to become so long-lived as a group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A fossil of the oldest known ancestor of modern rats — an agile creature that could climb, burrow and eat just about anything — has been unearthed in China, scientists said Thursday.<\/p>\n
The newly named species Rugosodon eurasiaticus had flexible ankles for tree-climbing and sharp teeth that could gnaw both animals and plants, according to the U.S. journal Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":9095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}