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Ancient marsupials lived in large packs
Marsupials have long been thought of as loners throughout their evolutionary history. But now, this notion has been overturned.
A rare fossil discovery uncovered by an international team of scientists has for the first time suggested that unlike their modern ancestors who are, for the most part, solitary animals, ancient marsupials may have lived in social groups.
The site contains the fossil remains of 35 specimens of Pucadelphys andinus, a primitive opossum from the early Paleocene Epoch, 64 million years ago, reports Nature.
Sandrine Ladeveze, a palaeontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, said the marsupial specimens are fossilized in two clusters, neither covering an area larger than one square metre, with 12 nestled together at one location and 23 at another, just three metres away.
Ladeveze and her colleagues believe that the marsupials were living together in two burrows when some sort of disaster, such as a flash flood, buried them alive.
“Sociality of this sort has been seen in fossils of other groups before [such as dinosaurs], but this is the earliest example of social gathering in marsupials that we have ever seen,” said Zhe-Xi Luo, a palaeontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“That such a mix of marsupials lived together hints that their modern solitary lifestyle was not present 64 million years ago,” said Ladeveze.
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