The animal \u2013 a cousin of modern-day marsupials \u2013 lived in Colorado roughly 70 to 75 million years ago. <\/p>
Palaeontologists have uncovered an extraordinary piece of the past hidden in the windswept hills of western Colorado<\/strong> \u2013 a fossilised mammal, about the weight of a chicken, that once scurried through prehistoric swamps around the time of the dinosaurs. <\/strong><\/p> This ancient creature, now named\u00a0Heleocola piceanus<\/em> (H. piceanus<\/em>), offers a glimpse into what life was like in the US state some 70 to 75 million years ago.<\/p> The fossil, discovered by a team led by Jaelyn Eberle from the University of Colorado Boulder, was identified from a small fragment of jawbone and three molar teeth. <\/p> It was uncovered near the towns of Rangely and Dinosaur, close to the Dinosaur National Monument. According to Eberle, the name\u00a0Heleocola<\/em>\u00a0fittingly translates to ‘swamp dweller’ in Latin, as the mammal lived in a region where a vast inland sea once spread across the American West.<\/p> \u201cColorado is a great place to find fossils, but mammals from this time period tend to be pretty rare,\u201d says Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the\u00a0CU Museum of Natural History<\/a>\u00a0and professor in the\u00a0Department of Geological Sciences<\/a>. \u201cSo it\u2019s really neat to see this slice of time preserved in Colorado.\u201d<\/p> Though it may seem small compared to the colossal dinosaurs such as tyrannosaurs<\/a> that roamed the region,\u00a0H. piceanus<\/em> was actually a giant by mammalian standards during the Late Cretaceous. <\/p> Weighing an estimated two pounds or more, it was much larger than the typical mouse-sized mammals of the time. Based on its teeth, the creature likely had a plant-based diet, with perhaps a few insects or other small critters added to the mix.<\/p>