Cryptomundo » New Fossil Find: Yanoconodon

New Fossil Find: Yanoconodon

Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 16th, 2007

Yanoconodon allini

What was drinking from that creek bed in the neighborhood? This artist’s representation shows Yanoconodon allini, a 125-million-year-old mammal fossil found in China. The five inch long mammal is important for its significance in the origins of the inner ear. (Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation)

For more, see: Paleontologists Discover New Mammal From Mesozoic Era.

This fossil’s importance to cryptozoology is nil, but it does demonstrate the Chinese are hard at work discovering more fossils. Let’s hope they come up with a complete fossil subcranial skeleton of Gigantopithecus soon!

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 7:09 am and is filed under Breaking News, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoology, Extinct, Fossil Finds. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.

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15 Responses to “New Fossil Find: Yanoconodon”

kittenz responds: March 16th, 2007 at 8:39 am
I think that as more fossils turn up, we will find that mammals have been around a LOT longer than is generally thought.

In my opinion the “mammal-like reptiles” of the late Permian and the Triassic should also be classified as mammalian. Of course, we do not know, nor will we probably ever know, if they were “mammals” in the strictest sense of the word: we cannot know if they fed their young with glandular secretions such as milk.

I’ve been fascinated with the Synapsida for a long, long time. I believe that if we could look back in time and see them, we would be shocked at their appearance, because I think we would see mammalian traits such as furry bodies, ear pinnae, and rhinaria with whiskers, like other mammals have.
Ceroill responds: March 16th, 2007 at 10:11 am
kittenz, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I remember when it was an astounding revelation that some dinosaurs had feathers.
skeptik responds: March 16th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Let’s wait to see what John Hammond cooks up.
kittenz responds: March 16th, 2007 at 11:09 am
lol, skeptik
mystery_man responds: March 16th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Just goes to show you that fossils are far from finished with teaching us about the history of life on this world. I really feel there are going to be a lot more amazing fossil discoveries in the coming years, and I think some of these are going to challenge some established notions.
U.T. Raptor responds: March 16th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
“In my opinion the “mammal-like reptiles” of the late Permian and the Triassic should also be classified as mammalian”
Indeed they probably should. On the same note, I imagine dinosaurs should also be classified with the birds for essentially the same reasons…
kittenz responds: March 16th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
U.T. Raptor, I agree, except that I think that birds and dinosaurs, along with crocodiles, should all be classed as archosaurs.
sschaper responds: March 16th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Monotremes?
kittenz responds: March 17th, 2007 at 7:56 am
Monotremes in my opinion are very primitive mammals. They do produce a kind of milk to feed their young.
Arctodus responds: March 18th, 2007 at 2:31 am
Kittenz, your comments are largely on the money. There already is evidence of leathery type skin on both a gorgonopsid and a thermocephalian from some permian fossils. It seems that synapsids and sauropsids (birds,reptiles) diverged from each other as soon as the first amniote crawled on land and laid shelled eggs, if not even earlier! The mammal-like reptile term is wrong, as mammals never evolved from reptiles or vice versa. It’s possible even ancient cold-blooded mammals like dimetrodon nursed their young, as this is a behavior known in some fishes and a type of amphibian known as a caecilian.

There are two traits that certainly would shock us if we went back in time to say the Jurassic period. Every species of mammal at the time would probably have all the traits you listed, but they would also have two traits known only among modern-day monotremes. They would be egg-layers and every last one of them would look like furry sprawling salamanders.

No one knows why warm-blooded mammals remained sprawlers for more than 140 million years (if you count the likely warm-blooded permian synapsids).

It’s not until the eutherian (placental) eomaia and the metatherian (marsupial) sinodelphys that erect gaits evolve among mammals.
mystery_man responds: March 18th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Arctodus- Great info! Thank you for posting it.
kittenz responds: March 18th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Arctodus,

Yes that’s a great post! I for one am not convinced that all of the early mammals (or mammal-like creatures) were sprawlers. Nor do I believe that they were all ectotherms. Individuals of some small species have been found in what appears to be a sleeping position with their very long tails curled around over their muzzles, much as modern mammals with furry tails sleep, and if they had fur it’s likely that at least some of them were endotherms. Their is other strong evidence that some of the synapsids not only had fur but had whiskers as well. Vibrissae are usually an indication that the animal is nocturnal at least part of the time. And most nocturnal animals are endothermic.

We have had the image of synapsids as big, lumbering, mindless, cold-blooded lunks drummed into our heads for so long that it comes as something of a shock to think they may have been furry, active creatures somewhat like modern mammals. And if they were more like modern mammals than they were like “reptiles”, and they were wiped out by widespread climate change, that means that we could be too, despite our big brains and active metabolisms.
The fossil record for synapsids is much more fragmentary than even that for dinosaurs. What has already been discovered and described is bound to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Ceroill responds: March 18th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Ok, here’s where I show how out of touch I am (blushing). When I was growing up the ‘mammal-like-reptiles’ were called Therapsids. Is this simply a renaming of the same class of creatures?
Arctodus responds: March 19th, 2007 at 12:09 am
-Ceroill

Therapsids are one of the two great clades within Synapsida. The other clade is Pelycosauria. The whole “Mammal-like reptile” classifications are up for intense debate and reviews. So far, Synapsids, which are mammals and their shared relatives all the way back to the last common ancestor of Synapsids and Sauropsids (reptiles, birds, etc.) are regarded as part of Reptilimorpha.

Many workers in the field privately think the old concept of reptiles and mammal independently evolving from amphibians may not have been far off the mark. They’re still finding earlier and earlier basal specimens of the two classes.

Skin characteristics alone show marked differences between the two classes. Mammals have very primitive amphibian-like skin while reptiles have a very advanced scaly skin.
mystery_man responds: March 21st, 2007 at 11:15 am
An important aspect of this find is how it shows some of the earlier stages in the development of the mammillian sense of hearing. Mammals have the most advanced sense of hearing of any land animals and it is thought that the inner workings of the ear evolved from part of the jawbone in earlier lifeforms. In Yanoconodon, these structures are not fully detached from the jawbone yet and thus give some idea as to how the structures we use for hearing developed.

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