Move over , T. rex — there ’s a new Chompin ’ King of the Cretaceous . fossilist say a Wisconsinite - sized pouched mammal namedDidelphodon voraxmay have had the warm bite military unit of any mammal that ’s ever last . They publish their findings in the journalNature Communications .
Until quite lately , very little was known aboutDidelphodonand its first cousin from the Cretaceous Period . Scientists really had only minor fragments of teeth and bone to go on . From these , we knew thatD. voraxwas the bighearted in the family , and that it was durophagous , or a bonecracker , biting down firmly to crush its prey . But bigger pieces have get down to come out from an area of rocks along Hell Creek , Montana . Over the last 15 twelvemonth , paleontologists excavated an additional twoDidelphodonjaw bones , part of a snout , and a near - consummate skull .
ikon Credit : Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture
Analysis of these new pieces reveal that the scrappy little pouched mammal had evolved much earlier than previously think — about 10 to 20 million years earlier .
Researchers put the fossils through calculate imaging ( CT ) scanners to get a good thought of how they reckon inside and out . Then they used the result 3 - D effigy to estimate how longD. vorax ’s jaw heftiness would have been and how they would have attached to its skull . To get an idea of the animal ’s diet , the team also analyzed patterns of vesture on the fossilized teeth .
The bone secernate a tarradiddle of a tough and not particularly grouchy creature . D. voraxlikely weighed between about five and 11 pounds . It ate pretty much whatever it could find , from plants and dirt ball to spiders , crayfish , and shellfish . And its jaws were amazing ; the researchers say this little critter may have had the strongest bite of any mammal that ’s ever be . In technical terms , its BFQ ( collation military unit quotient ) is 201 . An African Leo ’s jawsmax outat around 151 .
These findings upend everything we thought we jazz about Mesozoic mammalian , head source Gregory P. Wilson of the University of Washingtonsaidin a assertion . " Instead of a shrew - like mammal meekly scurrying into the shadows of dinosaurs , [ D. vorax ] would ’ve been a dread predator on the previous Cretaceous landscape — even for some dinosaurs . "
