Fossil shelved for a century reworks carnivore family tree
Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - 11:35
in Paleontology & Archaeology
More than a hundred years after its discovery, the limbs and vertebrae of a fossil have been pulled off the shelf at the American Museum of Natural History to revise the view of early carnivore lifestyles. Carnivores -- currently a diverse group of mostly meat-eating mammals like bears, cats, raccoons, seals, and hyenas -- had been considered arboreal in their early evolutionary history.