The question of how porcupines evolved in North America has been a long-standing mystery, but a stunning fossil find in Florida finally provides some answers. In this blog post, we explore how a rare, nearly complete fossil has aided researchers in unraveling the evolutionary history of these prickly critters.
Cracking the Evolution Code
Scientists for years have been baffled by the absence of fossils needed to better trace the history of the North American porcupine. The porcupines of the New World are neither nocturnal nor arboreal; in fact this type only climbs trees to flee from predators or gain a clearer view.
Unfortunately, the fossil record is notoriously fragmentary, yielding at best partial jaws and tails that superficially looked like those of Neotropical porcupines. This Grant wrote, set up the matching pair of hypotheses about those missing fossils refereed to earlier: They promised that “those early porcupine ancestors in North America would look just as these that are currently on Neotropics.” the alternative being that “Neotropical-like attributes lingered longer than originally anticipated in early ancestral porcupines.
Landmark Fossil Find
That all changed in 2005, when scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History discovered a near-complete porcupine skeleton dated at 2 million years ago from north-central Florida. Such a discovery was an invaluable contribution to this debate and provided plenty of material for researchers around the world to finally come up with a solution.
These characteristics were more akin to those of the living Neotropical porcupines, which have a longer tail and jaw unspecialized for gnawing bark. But the researchers report that detailed measurements of the anatomy showed that the fossil was less closely related to its sultry cousins than to a northern relative, the North American porcupine.
It indicated that the classic traits of the modern North American porcupine – stronger jaw, and shorter tail – were relatively recent evolution having developed over the last 8 million years or so. So during the better part of their 10 million year ancestry, these porcupines were Neotropical-like and hence hard to find in order to explain why there were so many fossil gaps.
Conclusion
The find in Florida was lucy that had finally revealed a secret of porcupine evolution in North America that may be unraveled. The jaw and tail form that distinguish North American porcupines from their cousins clearly emerged fairly late in their 30-million-year history, new research on fossil jaws suggests. But now, a new fossil unveiling the previously undescribed “winged serpent” has filled in some gaps in their evolutionary history — and shown how crucial rare fossil discoveries are for clarifying the mysteries of life on Earth.
