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American researchers believe they have discovered an animal in the badger family and the size of a cat that lived with the last dinosaurs.
A mammal the size of a cat, nicknamed “crazy animal” by scientists in Denver, USA. In the USA, he lived in Madagascar, along with the last dinosaurs on planet Earth.
The 66 million-year-old fossil is described in the journal Nature. This discovery challenges previous assumptions that the mammals of the occasion would have to be very small, the size of mice, to survive alongside dinosaurs.
Investigators say this animal weighed three pounds and had not reached adult size. Scientists think the creature, from the badger family, known as “Adalatherium”, would bury itself in the ground, helping it to escape predatory dinosaurs.
This could explain how it evolved at that size. Before mammals took over Earth, they probably had to flee and hide from the considerably larger dinosaurs that ruled the planet, not to mention crocodiles and poisonous snakes.
Scientists hope the discovery will help them understand how mammals evolved in the diversity of species we see today.
The name “Adalatherium” is translated from the Malagasy and Greek languages and means “crazy beast”. The discovery “breaks many rules,” David Krause of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who led the research, told the BBC.
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