EUROPE: When Charles Darwin visited South America on HMS Beagle in the 1830s, he discovered fossils of several hefty mammals that defied classification, such as Macrauchenia, which looked like a humpless camel with a long snout; or Toxodon, with a rhino’s body, hippo’s head and rodent-like teeth — which he described as “perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered”.
Since Darwin’s time, no-one has been able to work out where the bizarre beasts fit in the mammalian family tree. But now, by analyzing ancient collagen protein from 12,000-year-old fossils, researchers say that they have solved the puzzle. The scientists behind the work also think that ancient proteins could revolutionize the study of long-extinct species, revealing the secrets of fossils millions of years older than can be studied using DNA.
Part of a group of more than 250 mammals known as the South American ungulates, the creatures lived on the continent for around 60 million years before disappearing around 12,000 years ago. The confusion over their ancestry is partly due to a fragmentary fossil record, but also because researchers have had no luck isolating DNA from South American ungulate fossils; the molecule degrades quickly in the continent’s warm climate.
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