Found! The Newest (Old) Unbearably Cute Beardog

Artist rendering of a new pocket predator: a reclassified Chihuahua-sized beardog with teeth made for the munching and crunching of anything it could catch. Credit: Monica Jurik, The Field Museum. Last year, I had the pleasure (and it was a pleasure...a delight, actually) of digging through some of the off-exhibit collections at The Field Museum in Chicago. I was shadowing paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, who was visiting the museum to take measurements of some of the many crocodilian specimens in its cavernous collection halls. We searched through row after row of cabinets and shelves loaded with orderly boxed and bagged, labeled and tagged skulls. Lights on timers sometimes flickered out in far corners of the halls, leaving us surrounded by shadow and toothy dead things. The collections are one of those places that are at once slightly creepy — especially when you turn a corner and come eye-to-eye with a large stuffed croc — and tantalizing. It was hard not to just run up and down the aisles, flinging open cabinet doors and rifling through the contents with uncontrolled curiosity. (I'm sure Field Museum collections curators appreciated my restraint.) With today's announcement of a surprise discovery among those shelves, I can't help but wonder how close we were standing to remains of the cutest little beardog that ever crushed and crunched its way through an Eocene meal. The discovery, published today in Royal Society Open Science, is a great example of why the fossils you don't see at a museum may be some of its most important. Researcher Susumu Tomiya was a recent arrival to The Field, just poking around the mammal collection to learn what was where, when he noticed something odd about a set of jaws. When it had been unearthed decades earlier at a site in Texas, the roughly 38 million-year-old specimen was assigned to the genus Miacis: primitive, carnivorous mammals with the size and low-slung build of, say, a small ferret or weasel. Tomiya thought the teeth weren't quite right for Miacis, and started to investigate. He tracked down a second specimen originally found at the same location and currently held in the collections of the University of Texas at Austin. It had been classified as another species within Miacis, but its teeth had similar adaptations to those on the jaws at The Field.