Saber - toothed lions andtigersno doubt struck terror into our meth age ancestors , but what to make of a saber - toothed squirrel ? Humanity never had to decide if the new discovered speciesPseudotherium argentinuswas horrendous or cute since it lived during the Late Triassic , when even the dinosaurs were yet to peak , but some Hollywood animators may be feeling self-satisfied about their capacitance to ticktack paleontologists to the true statement .
Pseudotheriumwas see byDr Ricardo Martinezof Argentina ’s University of San Juan based on a 6.9 - centimetre ( 2.8 - column inch ) adult skull that evoke the whole animate being was 25 centimeters ( 10 inches ) long . It was n’t a squirrel , or even technically a mammal , instead being classified as a mammaliamorph – a group of tightlipped mammal congener – living 231 million years ago . Pseudotheriummay have been quite tight related to to an ancestor of mammals , but it miss the distinct expanded brain region that separate mammalian from our predecessors , accord to the subject field inPLOS One .
Nevertheless , Pseudotheriumshows a remarkable resemblance to Scrat , the squirrel / rat ancestral animal that is one of the wizard of theIce Agecartoons . " The new species has a very long , flat , and shallow snout , and its very long fang site almost at the hint of the snout , so the resemblance [ to Scrat ] is tremendous , " Martinez told Argentina’sAgency CTyS - UNLaM. He even regard name the species after the fibre .
Pseudotheriumisn’t the first animal we have key out that take care like this . Cronopio dentiacutuswas a true mammal with a standardised size of it and shape toPseudotheriumthat lived 95 million years ago during the Cretaceous and whose 2011 discovery also followed , rather than inspired , the film . The resemblance is a outcome of convergent evolution , where similar environmental shape bring forth parallel solutions . We can only speculate on where their common resemblance to a sketch persona comes from .
With only one specimen , we do n’t know much aboutPseudotherium’slifestyle or why it needed such dreaded tooth . populate before the first flowering industrial plant , they would sure as shooting not have been to open acorns . Instead , it probably had a diet of insect or little animal . The teeth could have been used to enchant and tear into prey but may also have been for fighting over soil or fellow , particularly if the specimen Martinez get hold was male .
The discovery was made in the multi - coloured rocks of Ischigualasto , San Juan , northwesterly Argentina , a placement known as Moon Valley and a rich source of Triassic fogy . More lately , these include two new specie Martinez find near thePseudotheriumskull , oneamong the oldest relative of the famous long - neckedsauropodsand the other a member of the rarefied lagerpetid humble dinosaur relatives .
