Newly found fossils Dormaalocyon sheds light on origins of carnivorous mammals

The species found near the Belgian Dormaal was in many ways a kind of prototype of the dog and cat: On the basis of several newly found fossils, a research group at Floreal Solé and Richard Smith of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences arranged the slender tree-dwellers in the pedigree of today predators under a mammals.

Your published in the current "Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology" study, Dormaalocyon was not at the very beginning of the development of this group of animals, but one of her very early representatives.

Dormaalocyon lived about 55 million years ago in the forests of the early Eocene . Our widths were dominated subtropical at this time : Large rain forests dominated the landscape, flitted through their branches Dormaalocyon . The fact that the robber was a tree dweller , the researchers from analyzes of his ankle joints connected. It was an ecological niche that was not occupied by the large, flightless birds of prey, which in many places were at that time at the top of the food chain.

What dog and cat friends - as their pet animals often rather in opposition to each other - is more likely verdattern , however, is that Dormaalocyon one of the ancestors of both groups of animals .

The animal was standing so close to the origin that it finds its place in the family tree of dog such as felids in the development of today's mammals. This Dormaalocyon belongs to the ancestors of lions and tigers , seals and wolves , bears and weasels . The original , first common ancestor remains so although ungefunden . But law should be sure that Dormaalocyon him closely resembled - the little Belgian is now the earliest known to us Ur Raiders with living , direct descendants.

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