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Reuters
Researchers believe that this animal, about the size of a domestic cat, lived alongside the last dinosaurs.
A cat-sized mammal called the “crazy beast” lived in Madagascar among some of the last dinosaurs to walk the Earth, scientists revealed.
The 66 million-year-old fossil is described in the journal Nature.
Their discovery challenges previous assumptions that mammals would have had to be very small, the size of mice, to survive alongside dinosaurs.
The researchers say this individual animal weighed 3 kg (6.6 pounds) and had not reached its full adult size.
Scientists think the badger-like creature, known as Adalatherium, would have been buried, helping it evade predatory dinosaurs. This could explain how it evolved to such a size.
Before mammals took over Earth, they probably had to run and hide from the much larger dinosaurs that ruled our planet, not to mention crocodiles and constrictor snakes.
Scientists hope the find will help them understand how mammals became the wide variety of species we see today.
The name “Adalatherium” is translated from the Malagasy and Greek languages and means “crazy beast”.
His discovery “bends and even breaks many rules,” said David Krause of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who led the research,
