Paleontologists discover Colorado ‘swamp dweller’ that lived alongside dinosaurs | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder
Paleontologists dig for fossils in northwestern Colorado.
Credit: John and ReBecca Foster.
AI-Generated illustration of life in a Cretaceous swamp near the Western Inland Seaway
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So, their cult leaders are forever scraping around trying to find evidence that human beings and dinosaurs lived together and even that Jesus would have been familiar with T. rex or Diplodocus and was probably used to pterosaurs flying overhead. But of course, there is none - which was never a reason for a creationist to abandon a delusion.
What there is, however, is evidence that dinosaurs were around until about 66 million years ago then promptly went extinct to be replaced by birds and mammals as the dominant terrestrial life forms.
And now we have evidence of an early mammal living amongst dinosaurs in what if now Colorado, USA. Sadly, there is no evidence that the early mammal resembled Jesus or any other humans for that matter; it was more like a muskrat.
The 'Western Interior Seaway' of North America. The Western Interior Seaway was a vast inland sea that split North America during the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 100 to 66 million years ago. Stretching from the Arctic Ocean down to the Gulf of Mexico, it separated the continent into two large landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. The seaway covered parts of present-day Canada, the central United States, and even parts of northern Mexico, creating a dynamic, shallow marine ecosystem teeming with life.It lived in the swamps that then formed the wetlands around the 'Western Interior Seaway' that covered much of North America 70 million years ago. It was discovered by a team of paleontologists led by Jaelyn Eberle of University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and Department of Geological Sciences, and including John Foster of Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum and ReBecca Hunt-Foster of Dinosaur National Monument, Jensen, Utah, Joshua Cohen, of the Biology Department, California State University Northridge, and Andrew Heckert of the Department of Geological & Environmental Sciences, Appalachian State University.
Formation and Geography
The seaway emerged due to tectonic activity as the Farallon Plate subducted beneath the western edge of the North American Plate. This created a depression in the continent that allowed water to flood in from the Arctic and the Gulf. The seaway expanded and contracted over time, fluctuating in depth and extent. During its peak, it was around 600 miles wide and reached depths of up to 600 feet.
Ecosystem and Life
The Western Interior Seaway hosted a rich array of marine and terrestrial life, creating diverse ecosystems that fossilize exceptionally well. Invertebrates, fish, and large marine reptiles like Mosasaurus (a formidable sea lizard), Elasmosaurus (a long-necked plesiosaur), and Tylosaurus were top predators. Sharks, bony fish, and shellfish like ammonites, clams, and snails populated its waters, while large schools of Xiphactinus (a predatory fish) swam the depths.
Terrestrial Influences
The coastal margins of the seaway had lush vegetation and were inhabited by dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and Ankylosaurus, which roamed the western landmass of Laramidia. These land masses also supported a diverse range of plant life, from conifers to ferns, which thrived in the humid, coastal environment. Rivers drained into the seaway, bringing sediment that formed extensive deltas and wetlands.
Importance of the Seaway in Paleontology
The seaway left a significant fossil record, particularly in regions like the Niobrara Formation in Kansas and the Pierre Shale in South Dakota, which contain exceptionally preserved marine fossils. These fossil sites offer a detailed look at Late Cretaceous marine ecosystems and provide key insights into the evolution of marine reptiles, fish, and invertebrates. For instance, the chalky Niobrara Formation is famous for its well-preserved fossils of pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and fish, allowing paleontologists to study these organisms' structure and lifestyles in detail.
Decline and Aftermath
As the Cretaceous period ended, the Western Interior Seaway gradually receded due to a combination of falling sea levels and tectonic uplift. Sediments from the retreating waters eventually formed the Great Plains, leaving behind vast chalk and shale deposits that record millions of years of marine life.
Today, the Western Interior Seaway's legacy can be seen in these deposits and fossil beds scattered across North America, providing a window into one of the most intriguing ancient seas in Earth's history.
Their findings are published in the open access journal, PLOS ONE, and described in a University of Colorado Boulder new release:
Paleontologists discover Colorado ‘swamp dweller’ that lived alongside dinosaurs
A team of paleontologists working near Rangely, Colorado, has uncovered a new (or, more accurately, very old) state resident—a fossil mammal about the size of a muskrat that may have scurried through swamps during the Age of Dinosaurs.
A team of paleontologists working near Rangely, Colorado, has uncovered a new (or, more accurately, very old) state resident—a fossil mammal about the size of a muskrat that may have scurried through swamps during the Age of Dinosaurs.
The researchers, led by CU Boulder’s Jaelyn Eberle, published their findings Oct. 23 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Eberle and her colleagues named their discovery, which they identified from a piece of jawbone and three molar teeth, Heleocola piceanus. The animal lived in Colorado roughly 70 to 75 million years ago—a time when a vast inland sea covered large portions of the American West. (Fittingly, “Heleocola” roughly translates to “swamp dweller” in Latin).
“Colorado is a great place to find fossils, but mammals from this time period tend to be pretty rare,” said Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the CU Museum of Natural History and professor in the Department of Geological Sciences. “So it’s really neat to see this slice of time preserved in Colorado.”
Compared to much larger dinosaurs living at the time like tyrannosaurs or the horned ancestors of Triceratops, the new fossil addition to Colorado might seem tiny and insignificant. But it was surprisingly large for mammals in the Late Cretaceous, Eberle said.
She’s also glad to see Rangely, which sits in the northwest corner of the state not far from Dinosaur National Monument, get its due.
It’s a small town, but, in my experience as a paleontologist, a lot of cool things come out of rural environments. It’s nice to see western Colorado have an exciting discovery.
Jaelyn Eberle, lead author
University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and Department of Geological Sciences
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
Land meets water
That cool discovery helps to paint a more complete picture of a Colorado that would be all but unrecognizable to residents today.
Paleontologists John Foster and ReBecca Hunt-Foster, co-authors of the new study, have been coming to this part of the state to dig up fossils every summer for about 15 years. Seventy million years ago, it was a place where land met water. Here, creatures like turtles, duck-billed dinosaurs and giant crocodiles may have flourished in and around marshes and estuaries, gorging themselves on vegetation, fish and more.
Map of a body of water known as the Western Interior Seaway covering much of North America roughly 75 million years ago.Credit: Sampson et al., 2010..
The region might have looked kind of like Louisiana. We see a lot of animals that were living in the water quite happily like sharks, rays and guitarfish.
ReBecca Hunt-Foster, co-author
Dinosaur National Monument
Jensen, Utah, United States of America
John Foster first remembers seeing the bit of mammal jaw emerge from a slab of sandstone that he collected from the site in 2016. The fossil measured about an inch long.
“I said, ‘Holy cow, that’s huge,'” said Foster, a scientist at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, Utah.
One big mammal
Eberle explained that before an asteroid killed off the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, mammals tended to be small—most were about the size of today’s mice or rats. She largely identifies them from the tiny teeth they left behind.
H. piceanus, in comparison, was positively huge. Eberle estimates that the animal, a cousin to modern-day marsupials, weighed 2 pounds or more, larger than most Late Cretaceous mammals. (It’s not quite a record—another fossil mammal from the same period, known as Didelphodon, may have weighed as much as 11 pounds). Based on H. piceanus’ teeth, the mammal likely dined on plants with a few insects or other small animals mixed in.
While dinosaurs get all the glory, the new find is another reason why paleontologists shouldn’t overlook ancient mammals. Small or not, they played an important role in Colorado’s ecosystems in the Late Cretaceous.
They’re not all tiny. There are a few animals emerging from the Late Cretaceous that are bigger than what we anticipated 20 years ago.
Jaelyn Eberle
Hunt-Foster said that the Mountain West is a special place for anyone who loves fossils. She also urged people visiting public lands to not collect vertebrate fossils, such as dinosaurs, they may come across while hiking to avoid disturbing important scientific information. Instead, they should note the location, take a photo and alert a representative from a nearby museum or public land agency.
We have scientists that come from all over the world specifically to study our fossils. We really are lucky.
ReBecca Hunt-Foster
AbstractWhen 99.9975% of the history of life on Earth happened before your cult dogma says there was an Earth or life on it, you are bound to keep being refuted by practically every geology, plaeontology and evolutionary biology paper that gets published, and that's just what happened again with this paper.
Heleocola piceanus, a new, relatively large metatherian from Upper Cretaceous (‘Edmontonian’) strata of the Williams Fork Formation in northwestern Colorado is described, based on a recently discovered jaw fragment (MWC 9744), in addition to three isolated teeth initially referred by other studies to Aquiladelphis incus and Glasbius piceanus. Although sharing several morphologic characters with the Lancian genus Glasbius, H. piceanus lower molars are considerably larger than those of Glasbius and differ from the latter in lacking a buccal cingulid, possessing carnassiform notches on the cristid obliqua and entocristid, and bearing an entoconulid on m3. To examine the relationship of Heleocola piceanus to other metatherians, H. piceanus was scored into a previously existing taxon-character matrix. Our phylogenetic analysis recovers H. piceanus as the sister taxon to Glasbius, which is consistent with our morphologic comparisons. H. piceanus represents the oldest member of the Glasbiidae. A regression equation for predicting body mass of dentally conservative metatherians that utilizes the length of m1 estimates the mass of H. piceanus at 855–1170 g, which is comparable in mass to today’s muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) and large relative to other Late Cretaceous pediomyoids. Based upon its molar morphology, specifically the low inflated cusps, low height differential between the trigonid and talonid, and near-bunodont morphology, H. piceanus is interpreted as an omnivore with a plant-dominated diet.
Introduction
The Metatheria (marsupials and their closest fossil relatives) comprise some 330 extant species in 7 orders, the great majority of which inhabit the Southern Hemisphere [1, 2]. However, the clade appears to have originated in the Northern Hemisphere during Early Cretaceous time [3]. By the end of the Cretaceous, metatherians had dispersed across Europe, Asia, and North America and were more diverse and abundant than their eutherian contemporaries [2, 4]. Most Late Cretaceous metatherian species are represented almost exclusively by isolated teeth and jaws recovered from fossil localities in the US Western Interior.
Here, we describe a new genus of a relatively large metatherian (by Late Cretaceous standards) from Upper Cretaceous strata of the Williams Fork Formation on the Douglas Creek Arch, between the Uinta and Piceance Creek Basins in northwestern Colorado (Fig 1). The Williams Fork Formation comprises fluvio-deltaic and shallow marine deposits of late Campanian to early Maastrichtian (74–70 Ma) age [5, 6] that preserve a diverse vertebrate assemblage including dinosaurs, giant crocodilians, lizards, turtles, fishes, and mammals [7–12]. Among the dinosaurs, fossils of a chasmosaurine tentatively identified as Pentaceratops [8, 9, 13] as well as hadrosaurs and theropods are documented [10, 14]. Although not as well studied, the mammalian fossils recovered from the Williams Fork Formation are comprised largely of isolated teeth of multituberculates and metatherians, the latter of which include Alphadon, Turgidodon, Eodelphis, Aenigmadelphis, and tentatively Leptalestes [8, 11]. Prior to our study, only one mammalian dentary fragment, referred to the multituberculate Meniscoessus collomensis, had been documented from the Williams Fork Formation [15].
Fig 1. Geographic and stratigraphic location of the Williams Fork Formation study area and the new metatherian.
(A) General location in western United States, with study area in northwestern Colorado marked by yellow box. (B) Enlargement showing exposures of Mesaverde Group (including Williams Fork Formation) in the Douglas Creek Arch (green) between the Uinta Basin to the west, Piceance Basin to the east, and Blue Mountain uplift to the north; smaller black rectangle identifies study area of the new metatherian; outcrop distribution from Tweto [16]. (C) Locations of the four localities that yielded the new metatherian (red stars) southwest of Rangely, Colorado; strikes and dips from Noll [19] [Unpublished]. (D) Regional stratigraphy in the study area showing the thickness, age, and neighboring units of the Williams Fork Formation and Mesaverde Group. (E) Stratigraphic section of the Williams Fork Formation showing Sandstones A–H and stratigraphic occurrences of the four specimens of the new metatherian (by locality). D and E based on data in Noll [19] [Unpublished].
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310948.g001Eberle J, Cohen J, Foster J, Hunt-Foster R, Heckert A (2024) A new Late Cretaceous metatherian from the Williams Fork Formation, Colorado. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0310948. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310948
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by PLoS. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
It won't be the last - there will be more along in the next day or two, and this will continue until the cult changes its dogma and decides to live in the real world where scientific evidence is the basis for opinion, not the label that was pinned on you by your parents and which frauds with political ambitions want you to believe because they know how the truth undermines them.
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