Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2025

Computer reconstruction of the skeleton of the Miocene
 right whale Megabalaena, published this year

As another year draws to a close, it's time to take another dash through the mammalian palaeontological findings of the last twelve months. As always, this will be a rapid survey of some discoveries that I find particularly interesting without any detailed discussion, but hopefully covering as wide a range of prehistoric mammals as I can.

Large Herbivores

Land mammals don't come much larger than mammoths, and such animals, and their mastodon relatives, have shaped the world around them through their mere presence and the food they chose to eat. A study on southern mammoths (Mammuthus meridionalis) uncovered at a million-year-old site in northern Spain showed that the climate at the time was already Mediterranean, a warm gap within the Ice Ages, causing them to feed more on grasslands than trees. While hyenas had fed on some of the carcasses, they were not alone, as the evidence also shows clear signs of butchering with stone tools.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2024

Zalamdalestes

I have reached the end of another year and that means it's time for what has become a tradition on this blog over the last eight years: a look back at some of the discoveries about fossil mammals made in 2024 that didn't make into the regular posts. As usual, this will be a quick whistle-stop tour of mammalian palaeontology, hopefully focusing on some of the more interesting findings. Like any field of science, it has not been standing still.

Large Herbivores

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) are among the best-known of all prehistorical mammals to the general public and, aided by the fact that some lived recently enough to be preserved in permafrost, they are also amongst the best-studied. But there is still more to learn about the details of their lives and habits. A study published this year looked at the detailed isotopic composition of a fossil mammoth that had died about 12,000 BC in Alaska, showing that she was female, and had migrated over 1000 km (600 miles) during her lifetime, having originally been born in the Yukon. The area in which she died was popular with mammoths, but also with humans - she may have died peacefully, but the presence of people where mammoths congregated may not be a coincidence.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2023

Potamotherium

It's the last post of the year for 2023, and that means it's time once again to take a brief look at discoveries from the last year in the world of fossil mammals that didn't make it into this blog. Because, while dinosaurs are undoubtedly popular, the study of prehistoric mammals is also a major field, aided by that, being (mostly) relatively recent they tend to be more numerous and better preserved. Of course, everyone's heard of woolly mammoths and sabretooth cats but there's plenty more out there and, if I'm going to zip through them at speed today, I'm also going to try and cover as wide a range as possible. So, let's get going...

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2022

New reconstruction of the sabretooth cat
Homotherium, showing that the teeth
would not have been as visible as popularly
supposed

2022 approaches its conclusion and I have to say that, while far from perfect, it was an improvement on the previous two years. There were a couple of weeks without posts this year, one for positive reasons, and one less so, but overall it has been good. Next year, you can look forward to something other than monkeys in my "family" series of posts and also to the conclusion of the long-running Miocene series, which should be as early as February. Until then, here is the now-traditional year-end look back at the paleontological discoveries that didn't quite make it into the blog.

Large Herbivores

Probably the most distinctive thing about deer is that the males have antlers; branching bony head ornaments that are shed and regrown each year. This naturally raises the question of how this evolved, since no other animal has quite the same thing. Acteocemas was an Early Miocene deer, but despite living very early in the group's evolutionary history, it already had antlers that split into two near the tip - which the horns of animals such as cows and true antelopes never do. A Spanish fossil of the antlers described earlier this year showed that it was already shed and regrown, but microscopic analysis indicated that it appeared to have been present for over a year, suggesting longer a more irregular pattern of shedding that must have changed to the seasonal pattern we are familiar with more recently, perhaps in the Middle Miocene.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2021

Lesmesodon, a weasel-sized hyenadont.
A new species from Early Eocene France was
 described this year

And so another year approaches its conclusion and the pandemic seemingly isn't done with us yet. I had to self-isolate after a positive test myself for a couple of weeks (no symptoms, though) but if there's one thing that doesn't interrupt, it's blogging, so everything went smoothly here. But now it's time for what's becoming a traditional look at the paleontological discoveries of the past year that didn't get covered here but are worthy of at least a brief mention.

Large Herbivores

When we think of vertebrate fossils, the first thing that pops to mind is almost certainly going to be a skeleton of some kind, or perhaps just part of one. But there are also such things as ichnofossils - fossilised remains of how an animal affected its environment that no longer include any physical part of the animal itself. Perhaps the most obvious of these are fossil trackways - footprints of long-gone animals preserved in mud or other soft material that has since turned to stone. A study published this year examined the tracks left by two species of fossil horse. One of them, a one-toed close relative of the living species inhabiting southern Canada during the Ice Ages, turned out to have been galloping at around 34 kph (21 mph), which is quite fast for its small size (perhaps it was running from something). More significantly, however, the three-toed Miocene horse Scaphohippus was using a relatively unusual gait called the "rack" typically only seen in specialised domestic breeds today. 

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2020

The largest known Oligocene whale was
moved into the new genus Ankylorhiza
this year

Well, that year was... different. Fortunately, it didn't stop me posting and, indeed, a cancelled summer break meant that you got one more post than anticipated you lucky people, you. But as 2020 finally passes into the history books where it can bloody well stay, it's time for the end-of-year roundup of paleontological discoveries that didn't make the regular blog. As always, no theme, just a random assortment of journal papers that may, for all I know, be thoroughly contradicted by this time next year. But this is a collection of things that some scientist, somewhere, thinks that they demonstrated in 2020:

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2019

Nehalaennia, an 8 million-year-old rorqual
from the Netherlands, first described this year

As the year - and decade - approach their inevitable conclusion, it's time again to look back at a few palaeontological findings of 2019 that didn't, for whatever reason, make it into the regular Synapsida posts. As always, there is no theme to this list, just a sample of what seemed interesting linked only by when it happened to be published.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2018

Gordodon,
a new non-mammalian synapsid described this year

And so another year approaches its conclusion. As usual, I will wrap up here with a post looking at things from a slightly wider perspective. This time around, as I did last year, I am going to take a brief look at a range of scientific papers on fossil mammals that were published in 2018. There's not going to be any particular theme here beyond that, merely a list of things that caught my interest, and that were not, for various reasons, included in the blog proper. So, here we go:

Beginnings and Endings

In the modern day, it's pretty easy to tell mammals and reptiles apart. But, if we go far enough back in time, that eventually ceases to be so true. A common misunderstanding is that mammals evolved 'from' reptiles, but, in reality, mammals and reptiles are separate evolutionary lines that have lived alongside one another since long before there were dinosaurs. At least, that's true if we use the modern definition of 'reptile' since, of course, the animals that mammals really did evolve from would have looked an awful lot like reptiles if we'd been able to see them in the flesh.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2017

Albertocetus meffordorum, the post-cranial anatomy of which
was described for the first time this year.

At the end of each year, I do a slightly different post to wrap up the blog for the season. The format of these has changed over the years, and this year, again, it's time to do something slightly different from previous occasions. Not that there haven't been some interesting new species discovered this last year, with, to my mind, the Skywalker gibbon (Hoolock tianxing) being the stand-out example. This was announced early in the year, having been discovered in the Chinese/Myamar border region by a group of researchers who were fans of a certain science fiction franchise ("tianxing" literally translates to "sky-walker" in Standard Chinese), and is likely already endangered.

But this year, instead of discussing just how many new kinds of bat we discovered in the last twelve months, I'm going to note that my posts on fossil mammals tend to be more popular than those on the living sort, and take a look at a partial assortment of scientific papers published on this subject in the last year that, for various reasons, didn't end up in my regular blog posts. So here goes.