Bharattherium is a mammal that lived in India during the Maastrichtian and possibly the Paleocene. It is part of the gondwanathere family Sudamericidae, which is also found in Madagascar and South America during the latest Cretaceous. The generic name combines Bharat, Sanskrit for ‘India’, with the Ancient Greek therion, meaning ‘beast’
About Bharattherium in brief
Bharattherium is a mammal that lived in India during the Maastrichtian and possibly the Paleocene. It is part of the gondwanathere family Sudamericidae, which is also found in Madagascar and South America during the latest Cretaceous. The first fossil was discovered in 1989 and published in 1997, but the animal was not named until 2007, when two teams independently named the animal BharatTherium bonapartei and Dakshina jederi. The latter name is now a synonym. Bharattheria is known from a total of eight isolated fossil teeth, including one incisor and seven molariforms. The hypsodont teeth of sudamericids are reminiscent of later grazing mammals, and the discovery of grass in Indian fossil sites contemporaneous with those yielding Bhar attherium suggest that sud Americids were indeed grazers. The generic name combines Bharat, Sanskrit for ‘India’, with the Ancient Greek therion, meaning ‘beast’. The specific name, jeder, honors University of Michigan paleontologist Jeffrey A. Wilson, nicknamed ‘Jeder,’ who played an important role in the project that led to the Discovery of DakShina.
The genus has a single species, Bharat Therium bonAPartei. It was the first, first, and only member of its genus to be named by paleontologists in the 1990s and 2000s. It lived in southern India and is thought to have been a grazer, like other gondwana-related mammals. It has been described as a ‘molariform’ species, with high, curved teeth, with a height of 6 to 8. 5 millimetres. In a number of teeth, there is a large furrow on one side and a deep cavity in the middle of the tooth. The tooth enamel has traits that have been interpreted as protecting against cracks in the teeth. In 2008, Guntupalli Prasad commented that Bharat therium jederi represented the same species and that BharAttherium, which was published in 2008, was the correct name. Among the seven teeth in their sample, Wilson and colleagues identified five as fourth lower molarica amghino, which cannot be distinguished, because they are collectively known as “molarone’s”
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This page is based on the article Bharattherium published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
