Scientists Discover First Tree-Huggers
And the treetop living trend setting award goes to...
By TARA GRIMES
Updated 4:15 PM CST, Thu, Jul 30, 2009
For the first time in 260 million years, researchers at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History discovered the first animal to get a glance from the treetops.
With it’s elongated fingers, opposable “thumb” and a grasping tail it was the Suminia getmanovi that paved the way of the future for other tree-climbing creatures. Chameleons should weep and birds sing a song of praise. Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History called the animal a trailblazer.
"It is really significant in understanding how ecosystems evolved," Luo told the Chicago Tribune. "We see modern terrestrial animals that live underground, on the ground, in water, in flight and in trees. They did it by developing different ways of locomotion and feeding adaptations, like Suminia did."
Suminia is a vertebrate animal that evolved 300 million years ago and roamed for 10 million years. They are described as land-based animals who climbed to escape predators and to find food.
The researchers at the Field Mueseum were able to discover Suminia was a climbing animal by paying attention to its unusual physical attributes in the fossil bones.
Although Suminia did go extinct 250 million years ago and it wouldn’t be for another 100 million years before any other vertebrate animal would take the treetops.
First Published: Jul 30, 2009 3:34 PM CST
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