A millions-old fossil of world’s smallest hedgehog in scientific history was discovered at Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park in the northern British Columbia, according to a researcher from Brandon University.
The researcher, Dr. David Greenwood of the Department of Biology, discovered the hedgehog, along with another prehistoric mammal called tapir, while spearheading a fossil excavation in 2010 and 2011. The mammals were said to be roaming the North America some 52 million years ago.
Dr. Greenwood asked the assistance of Drs. Natalia Rybczynski from the Canadian Museum of Nature and Jaelyn Eberle from the University of Colorado, who are experts in fossil mammals, to distinguish the ancient jawbones.
"What we have discovered are an ancient tapir relative, about the size of a large dog, and a hedgehog relative, smaller than a mouse," says Dr. Greenwood, who is also an ancient climate and plant specialist. "This is remarkable because very few fossil mammals of this geological age have been described before in Canada."
The hedgehog’s bones were very delicate, worrying researchers that getting it off the rock would break its fossil apart. They decided to leave it embedded on the rock and went to have a micro-CT scan instead.
"I compared the scan of his molars to hundreds of little, tiny teeth," says Eberle to the Los Angeles Times. "But before too long I realized there isn't anything that looks exactly like this guy's teeth."
Researchers named the hedgehog Silvacola acares, meaning "tiny forest dweller." The fossil showed that the animal was merely two inches in length and was grown completely at the time of its death.
Research says the hedgehog was around some 13 million years ago, before being wiped out by asteroid, along with dinosaurs. It fed on plants, insects and perhaps seeds, too.
Meanwhile, the tapir in B.C. apparently was a bit larger than those tapirs living in North America during the same period, so this could be a different species. The fossil, however, is too small and preserved poorly to guarantee their assertions.
According to them, such fossil discovery is significant because the time these ancient mammals lived, the early Eocene epoch, indicated the height of global warming in the prehistoric times, in which there was a considerable reorganization of the animal and plant life in the world. At that time, the climate of B.C. was same with Portland, Oregon of today.
"We can gain insight into how the Earth was coping with a problem then that’s re-emerging now," Dr. Greenwood notes.
The team’s research and findings were recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
