GAINESVILLE, Fla., March 25 (UPI) -- A fossil shrew found in the badlands of Wyoming may show that mammals migrated into Africa as well as out of it.
Jonathan Bloch, a paleontologist at the University of Florida, led the team that discovered the skeleton of the elephant shrew, a small-bodied hopping mammal in the same family as elephants, aardvarks and sea cows. At 54 million years, the fossil is the oldest elephant shrew known.
"This research has broad implications because it indicates there may have been a great deal more interchange in terms of how animals moved around the world as the continents broke up than previously thought," Bloch said.
The elephant shrew was part of a mammal explosion that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs and the breakup of the super-continent of Gondwanaland.
"Mammals had a huge celebration with all the big predators gone and they just kind of took over," Bloch said. "They went crazy, filling all the open ecological niches they couldn't have exploited while the dinosaurs were still around."
