ARKANSAS: NSF Researcher and Team Discover Fossil of New Species of Pangolin in Europe
Pangolins are unique, scaled mammals found across Asia and in parts of Africa. Claire Terhune, University of Arkansas, and a team of researchers funded by NSF are using pangolin fossils to better understand the evolution and biogeography of ancient pangolins during the Pleistocene.
This work was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Terhune’s collaborators were Sabrina Curran at Ohio University, Timothy Gaudin the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Alexandru Petculescu at Emil Racoviţă Institute of Speleology in Bucharest.
“It’s not a fancy fossil,” said Claire Terhune. “It’s just a single bone, but it is a new species of a kind of a weird animal. We’re proud of it because the fossil record for pangolins is extremely sparse. This one happens to be the youngest pangolin ever discovered from Europe and the only pangolin fossil from Pleistocene Europe.”