BROADCASTS.com

b"Thanks to Lorenzo for suggesting Tiarajudens! We'll learn about it this week along with another extinct animal, Vintana.\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nFunky facial flanges [the skull picture below comes from this site]\\n\\nFirst Postcranial Fossils of Rare Gondwanatherian Mammal Unearthed in Madagascar\\n\\nThe Earliest Saberteeth Were for Fighting, Not Biting [the skeleton picture below comes from this site]\\n\\nVintana's skull had weird jugal flanges:\\n\\n\\n\\nTiarajudens had saber teeth as well as palatal teeth:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nJust last month we had an episode about the tenrec and an extinct animal called Adalatherium. At the end of that episode, I said something I say a lot, that we don\\u2019t know very much about it or the other ancient mammals that lived at the time, and that I hoped we would find some new fossils soon. Well, guess what! A paper about a newly discovered Gondwanathere fossil was published just a few days ago as this episode goes live. Rather than save it for the updates episode later this summer, let\\u2019s learn about an animal named Vintana sertichi, along with a suggestion from Lorenzo for another extinct animal.\\nAs you may remember from episode 324, Adalatherium is a member of a group of animals called Gondwanatheria, which arose in the southern hemisphere around the time that the supercontinent Gondwana was breaking apart. We only have a few fossils of these animals so paleontologists still don\\u2019t know how they\\u2019re related, although we do know they\\u2019re not related to the mammals living today. Every new specimen found of these rare mammals helps scientists fill the gaps in our knowledge. That\\u2019s what happened with Vintana.\\nVintana lived at the end of the Cretaceous, until the asteroid strike about 66 million years ago that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and a whole lot of other animals, probably including Vintana. The first fossilized specimen was a skull found in Madagascar and described in 2014. It was really well preserved, which allowed scientists to learn a lot about the animal.\\nVintana was an active animal that ate plants. It had large eyes and a good sense of smell and hearing, so its ears might have been fairly large too. Its face probably looked a lot like a big rodent\\u2019s face, but the skull itself had a weird feature. The cheekbones extended downward on each side next to the jaw, and these extensions are called jugal flanges. They would have allowed for the attachment of really big jaw muscles. That suggests that Vintana could probably give you a nasty bite, not that you need to worry about that unless you find a time machine. It might also mean that Vintana ate tough plants that required a lot of chewing.\\nVintana probably looked a lot like a groundhog, or marmot, which we talked about recently in episode 327. It wasn\\u2019t related to the groundhog, though, and was bigger too. Scientists estimate it weighed about 20 lbs, or 9 kg.\\nThe fossil specimen of Adalatherium that we talked about in episode 324 was discovered in Madagascar in 2020. When a tail vertebra from another mammal was found in the same area, researchers scanned and compared it to Adalatherium\\u2019s vertebrae. They were similar but not an exact match, plus the new bone was almost twice as large as the same bone in Adalatherium\\u2019s spine. It matched the size of Vintana and was assigned to that species. Vintana was probably related to Adalatherium but was bigger and had a shorter, wider tail. And as of right now, that\\u2019s just about all we know about it.\\nNext, let\\u2019s learn about another extinct animal, this one suggested by Lorenzo. Lorenzo gave me a bunch of great suggestions and I picked this one to pair with Vintana, because otherwise this episode would have been really short. Vintana lived at the end of the dinosaurs, but Tiarajudens lived long before the dinosaurs evolved, around 260 million years ago.\\nTiarajudens was a therapsid, a group that eventually gave rise to mammals altho..."