![]() ![]() ![]() Floods also appear to have been frequent.īut it was this "chaotic mixture" of events that led to decomposition of plant material contained in the island sediments that took oxygen out of the system, "a major factor in favor of the preservation of bones."ĭavid Martill, a University of Portsmouth dinosaur authority who has also conducted research on the Isle of Wight, said, "Steve has become internationally recognized as a leading expert in his field and has many more exciting discoveries yet to be announced. Sweetman, however, has found geological evidence suggesting that, as in many forests today, blazing fires would sometimes sweep through the region, leaving behind charred animal remains. The land of today's Isle of Wight was once much further south than it is today, with warmer, seasonal temperatures and plenty of rainfall. He said this mammal, as for most others from the Mesozoic Era, was "very small, shrew or mouse-like and probably insectivorous." Certain others were slightly bigger, "say, rat-sized, and probably filled niches now occupied by rodents." "It is of interest not just because it is something new, but because it is a new species of a genus (Eobaatar) that is otherwise known from rocks of roughly the same age occurring in Spain and slightly younger deposits in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia," he added. "This new species, as is often the case with fossil mammals, is known only from isolated teeth," Sweetman told Discovery News. His latest paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, concerns one of his rarest finds - the remains of a mammal that scurried around on the dinosaur-trampled ground. All of the fossils were discovered by a resident of the island, Steve Sweetman, who is a research associate with the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. ![]()
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