Catherine Rusoff
Researchers have discovered a new genus of prehistoric deer that they believe existed about 32 million years ago in an area around what is now southwestern South Dakota. The deer would not have looked like anything that exists today . A study on a fossilized skull found in Badlands National Park, which eventually led to new discoveries, suggested that all of these deer were hornless and about the size of a modern domestic cat.
The study was carried out by a team of researchers from the national park, the American Museum of National History and California State Polytechnic University, and recently published in the journal Proceedings of the South Dakota Academy of Science.
Mattison Shreero and Ed Welsh, both rangers at Badlands National Park, led the research effort. They named the newly discovered deer santuccimeryx, or “Santucci’s ruminant,” after paleontologist Vincent Santucci, who helped shape the park’s National Park Service paleontology program. he said this week.
In a statement to the agency, Santucci said he was “personally and professionally grateful to be associated with this important new fossil discovery,” especially because he came from the place where he began his career as a National Park Service paleontologist nearly four decades ago. .
Illustration by Benji Paysnoe / National Park Service
Santuccimeryx as a genus belongs to the family Leptomerycidae, which is extinct, and ranged across parts of North America from about 41 million years ago to about 11 million years ago. This family is considered a close relative of the mouse deer, whose appearance follows its name and which live in tropical forests in West Africa and Southeast Asia, according to the National Park Service. But certain features of this creature were unlike anything else – the skull, for example, had elements characteristic of different prehistoric animals that lived nearly 10 million years apart.
Researchers identified similarly unusual combinations by looking at dental features. This led them to identify the fossils as part of “a distinct species” within the previously unknown genus santuccimeryx.
“Genus” as a term refers to the group within which multiple species exist. For example, dogs, foxes, wolves, and a host of other dog-like creatures all belong to the same genus, called canis, while humans belong to the genus Homo sapiens.
The antlerless deer fossil was discovered in 2016 in the Badlands, which, like the creature itself, would have been an unrecognizable landscape during the period in which the deer actually lived. Geologists say The rock formations that eventually became the Badlands began to be deposited well before santuccimeryx, but the erosion processes that led to the park’s current appearance only began to happen 500,000 years ago.
