Eocene (Pt 5): Cerberus and the Pangolins

Eurotamandua

Today, when we think of large carnivorous land mammals, we think of such things as dogs, cats, and bears, but, while some of these families do date back to the Eocene, they were not found in Europe at the time. Instead, the dominant group of carnivorous mammals were the hyaenodonts.

While the name translates as "hyena-tooth" due to the description of the first fossils to be found, hyaenodonts were not hyenas, or even closely related to them. They belonged to a group entirely separate from the living carnivorans, and that survived alongside them until as recently as 10 million years ago, near the end of the Miocene. For most of that time, they could be regarded as primitive holdovers, vestiges of their past glory, but in the Eocene they were still at the height of their power.

Having said this, the first hynaenodonts to enter Europe were physically unimpressive, succeeding largely due to the fact that there wasn't much else to compete with. These are traditionally grouped into a subfamily called the "proviverrines", although the details are debated. For one thing, it's not at all clear which family (if any) they are a subfamily of. This is largely due to the higher-level classification having shifted since they were first named, but the membership of the group is also in doubt, since it's not at all clear that all of the traditionally defined species share a unique common ancestor with one another.

Bast, Sekhmet, and the Egyptian Hyena-cats

Megistotherium, a Miocene hyena-cat

The majority of the land-based mammalian predators we are familiar with today belong to the order Carnivora. This is a diverse order, including such mammal families as the cats, bears, dogs, weasels, and seals. In fact, if we ignore the cetaceans and a few kinds of marsupial, they are the only large carnivorous mammals alive. But, as so often, this was not always the case, and they once shared the world with at least three other orders of predatory placental mammal (plus some marsupials far more fearsome than any Tasmanian devil). 

Two of these orders died out relatively early on, but one of them survived for much longer, producing multiple diverse species that lived across Eurasia, North America, and Africa. These were the hyaenodonts, named for Hyaenodon itself, first identified from a fossil all the way back in 1838. With so many species, they must have been successful in their day, but their numbers declined until the last two species died out in Africa and India around 9 million years ago, perhaps due to competition from the carnivorans, perhaps due to long-term climate change. Or, more likely, both.

Oligocene (Pt 12): Reign of the Hyena-Cats

Apterodon

In most parts of the world today, all large, carnivorous, land-dwelling mammals are members of the order called, appropriately enough, the Carnivora. This is the group to which cats, dogs, and bears belong, along with many other animals from weasels to seals. If we go back far enough in time, we find that this group originated on the northern continents and was unable to reach the then-isolated southern ones until much later. During the Oligocene, therefore, there were no carnivorans in Africa.

Which isn't to say that there were no carnivorous mammals at all; absent some non-mammalian predator to out-compete them, it's just too useful a niche for nothing to evolve to make use of it. But those mammals were not close relatives of the lions and hyenas that live there today, belonging to different branches of the mammalian family tree.

Brains of the Monster-Teeth

Dissopsalis, another member 
of the "monster-tooth" family

Among the distinguishing features of mammals, as compared with other vertebrates are the larger relative size and greater structural complexity of the brain. It's worth pointing out at the outset that many birds are as capable as mammals of complex behaviour despite not possessing the brain structures we'd otherwise associate with such things so that we can't solely use brain anatomy as a proxy for things like 'intelligence'. But, if we're looking only at mammals, brain anatomy can tell us quite a bit and it's probably fair to say that it does distinguish us from, say, reptiles.

Miocene (Pt 22): Last of the Creodonts

The largest predator in Africa today

The dominant mammalian carnivores in Africa today are the lions, hyenas, and leopards, with cheetahs and wild dogs also playing their role. The ancestors of all of these creatures first reached the continent from the north, shortly after it collided with Eurasia during the Early Miocene. For the most part, at the time, their ancestors were small, with hyenas, for example, being no larger than mongooses. But this does not mean that Early  Miocene Africa had no large predators at all.

For one thing, the cats, hyenas, and so forth, were not the only carnivorous mammals to have made the crossing from Asia. The animals known as bear-dogs, or more technically, amphicyonids, are far better known from Europe, Asia, and North America, but they did reach Africa, too. 

The Big African Not-a-Lion

Spot the real lion

When it comes to fossil animals, there can be little doubt that the ones most popular with the general public are the large ones. There's a reason that dinosaurs seem to hold the most enduring fascination, and that even popular science books about the whole range of prehistoric life are almost bound to have them as part of their title. (And, while some dinosaurs were small, most of the ones we know about weren't, perhaps partly because it's easier to preserve large solid bones than small fragile ones).

It's not really any different with prehistoric mammals, with mammoths, mastodons, and sabretooth cats being the ones that most people would instantly recognise and be familiar with. Even dire wolves, which weren't really all that big, are surely better known than, say, extinct foxes or weasels of the same age. Which brings up a second point: even if an animal isn't as large as an elephant or Diplodocus, being unusually large for a carnivore will still help its public profile enormously.

How Fossil Rodents Met Their Doom

Tritemnodon, another early hyaenodontid
from Wyoming

A large part of palaeontology consists, as you might expect, of looking in detail at the fossils that are dug up. This can tell us a lot about the animal and how it lived. By analysing the shape of the teeth, we can get some clue as to what sort of things the animal ate, and from the shape and proportions of the limbs and other body parts we may be able to infer other details of the lifestyle. If it's a carnivore, for example, did it chase its prey, or pounce on it from hiding and overwhelm it with sheer physical force? If the former, it should have long, relatively slender limbs suitable for running, if the latter, we'd expect powerful limbs with attachments for strong muscles.

When it comes to fossil mammals, teeth are often the best guide. For one thing, being small, and made of material even harder than bone, they are more likely to be preserved, even if the entire rest of animal is missing. For another, for most mammals, the precise shape of the cheek teeth (molars and premolars) is highly distinctive, giving us clues as to how one particular species is related to others. Even if we did find, say, an isolated rib, it might be difficult to tell what it once belonged to, and it probably wouldn't tell you much about the animal in question even if you could - beyond, perhaps, some clue as to its size.

News in Brief #8

Attack of the Killer Walrus (Or Not)

The two principal families of fully aquatic carnivoran are the seals and the sea lions. To the casual observer, they can most easily be distinguished by the shape of their hind limbs. Sea lions can walk on all fours (albeit with a comical waddle), while true seals have to drag themselves about on land, their hind flippers being of little use out of the water. It's this that tells us that fur seals, for example, are members of the sea lion family, and not 'true' seals. But seals and sea lions are not the only aquatic carnivorans: there are two others. Firstly, there's the sea otter, a member of the weasel family. And then there is the walrus.

Walruses are kind of weird, when you think about it. Although they're probably more closely related to sea lions than they are to true seals, they're actually neither, and the walrus family is one of those odd mammal "families" that has only one species in it. But, as is so often the case with such "monotypic " families, that's only true if you count the living species. Because there used to be more.

Part of the reason that the walrus is so obviously peculiar is that it's adapted to doing only one thing (eating shellfish) and, moreover, doing it in a fairly specific habitat. But not all prehistoric walruses were the same. Some, for example, used to live in subtropical waters, and by no means all of them fed on shellfish.