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The Gobi desert of central Asia is renown for its accumulations
of fossil mammals and dinosaurs. Richly fossiliferous but previously little
worked 55 million year old strata are well exposed in the Bayan Ulan region
of Inner Mongolia, People's Republic of China. Colleagues from the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and
Paleoanthropology, Beijing [IVPP], and I discovered nodules representing
fossilized carnivore scat (coprolites). Dissolution of these structures
in weak acid has shown them to contain abundant, often exquisitely preserved
remains of small bodied mammals, the majority representing new taxa. Processing
of these nodules has yielded (and continues to yield) a wealth of new information
about mammalian evolution during the interval shortly following the demise
of dinosaurs, providing detailed anatomical data bearing on several controversies
in mammalian history. |
