Kollicodon
| Kollicodon | ||||||||||||
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Fossil of the lower jaw of kollikodon |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Lower Cretaceous | ||||||||||||
| 110 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name of the family | ||||||||||||
| Kollicodontidae | ||||||||||||
| Flannery , Archer , Rich & Jones , 1995 | ||||||||||||
| Scientific name of the genus | ||||||||||||
| Kollicodon | ||||||||||||
| Flannery, Archer, Rich & Jones, 1995 | ||||||||||||
Kollikodon ritchiei is an extinct species of mammal . She is one of the earliest known representatives of the monotremes and livedin Australia in the Cretaceous Period .
features
The fossil finds from Kollikodon are so far limited to an opalized part of a lower jaw , which was provided with a premolar and two molars . Today's mammals are toothless, but fossil relatives of the platypus such as the steropodon and obdurodon still had teeth, which allows conclusions to be drawn about the relationship. With their cross-shaped structure, the teeth were reminiscent of “ hot cross buns ”, raisin buns widespread in the English-Australian region, so that the joking name “Hotcrossbunodon” was coined for the genus. It is believed that the teeth were used by crustaceans to bite open . which would suggest a semi-aquatic way of life.
Otherwise hardly anything is known about the animals. Due to the size comparison with the lower jaw of today's mammals, the body length of Kollikodon was extrapolated to 1 meter, which would be very large for Mesozoic mammals; Such calculations can only be verified by further skeleton finds.
Systematics
Kollikodon is classified in its own family, Kollikodontidae, and is considered to be the basic representative of the mammals. Whether the species was more closely related to the platypus , as is sometimes claimed, cannot be answered without further findings.
literature
- Tim Flannery , Michael Archer , TH Rich, R. Jones: A new family of monotremes from the Cretaceous of Australia. In: Nature . Volume 377, 1995, pp. 418-420.