Researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science discover a 65-million-year-old mammal in the Colorado Springs area

It’s a discovery 65 million years in the making. Researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science discovered a new mammal species in Corral Bluffs, east of Colorado Springs.

What makes the discovery of this new mammal so important to academics is that the fossil dates from just after the dinosaurs became extinct. Because a complete skull and jaw of the species called Militocodon lydae were found, this gives researchers important clues to what they call an “explosive diversification in the wake of the dinosaur extinction.”

“Rocks from this time interval have a notoriously poor fossil record and the discovery and description of a fossil mammal skull is an important step forward in documenting the earliest diversification of mammals after Earth’s last mass extinction,” said Dr. Tyler Lyson, museum curator of vertebrate paleontology.

The overall revival of life after the dinosaurs remains largely unknown to zooarchaeologists because there is a lack of fossils from the period. With the discovery of the Militocodon lydae, which is about the size of a chinchilla, researchers discovered that it is part of a group of animals that subsequently became modern hoofed mammals, such as cows, pigs and deer.