Dino-era ‘rat-like creatures’ could be our oldest living ancestors

Seems like, before we were apes, we were rats. Fossils of the oldest mammals related to mankind were discovered on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset. The two teeth are from small, rat-like creatures that lived 145 million years ago in the shadow of the dinosaurs. They are the earliest undisputed fossils of mammals belonging to the line that led to human beings. They are also the ancestors to most mammals alive today, including creatures as diverse as the Blue Whale and the Pigmy Shrew.

The University of Portsmouth undergraduate student, Grant Smith, made the discovery. Lead author Steve Sweetman said that Grant was sifting through small samples of earliest Cretaceous rocks collected on the coast of Dorset as part of his undergraduate dissertation project when he found two quite remarkable teeth of a type never before seen from rocks of this age. ?I was asked to look at them and give an opinion and even at first glance my jaw dropped!”

“The teeth are of a type so highly evolved that I realised straight away I was looking at remains of Early Cretaceous mammals that more closelyresembled those that lived during the latest Cretaceous – some 60 million years later in geological …read more