'Bone Crusher' Dog 'More Like A Mini-Bear'; Scientist Identifies 12-Million-Year-Old Fossil
A PhD student from the University of Pennsylvania has identified a 12-million-year-old fossil discovered in Maryland as a new dog species with a particularly strong bite.
Cynarctus wangi, the newly named species, was a dog that was roughly the size of a modern coyote. It roamed the eastern North American coast about 12 million years ago and was a member of the subfamily Borophaginae, an extinct family of bone-crushing dogs characterized by their broad teeth and strong jaws. These dogs are believed to have lived between 10 million and 30 million years ago and may have become extinct due to fierce competition with the ancestors of today's coyotes, wolves, and foxes.
The new species was named for Xiaoming Wang, an expert on mammalian carnivores and curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The identification of Cynarctus wangi was recently published in the Journal of Paleontology.
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According to Steven E. Jasinski, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Penn's School of Arts & Sciences, he and his co-authors believe that the new species behaved similarly to modern hyenas. They also think that the "bone crusher" did not subsist exclusively on meat. It was, instead, an omnivore.
"Based on its teeth, probably only about a third of its diet would have been meat," Jasinski explained. "It would have supplemented that by eating plants or insects, living more like a mini-bear than like a dog."
The 12-million-year-old dog fossil was unearthed in the Choptank Formation of Maryland's Calvert Cliffs. The cliffs are on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
As Jasinski explained in a statement (via Discovery News), the location in which Cynarctus wangi was found is particularly significant as it offers a glimpse at the North America of 12 million years ago. According to Jasinski, fossils found from this region and period in history are usually seafaring creatures.
"Most fossils known from this time period represent marine animals, who become fossilized more easily than animals on land," he said. "It is quite rare we find fossils from land animals in this region during this time, but each one provides important information for what life was like then."
