{"id":540559,"date":"2025-01-14T09:58:25","date_gmt":"2025-01-14T12:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=540559"},"modified":"2025-01-14T09:58:25","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T12:58:25","slug":"marsupial-nursery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/marsupial-nursery\/","title":{"rendered":"Marsupial nursery"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_540484\" style=\"max-width: 1150px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright vertical\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-540484 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marsupial-xenocynus-crypticus-2024-07-1140.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1140\" height=\"630\" srcset=\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marsupial-xenocynus-crypticus-2024-07-1140.jpg 1140w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marsupial-xenocynus-crypticus-2024-07-1140-250x138.jpg 250w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marsupial-xenocynus-crypticus-2024-07-1140-700x387.jpg 700w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marsupial-xenocynus-crypticus-2024-07-1140-120x66.jpg 120w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1140px) 100vw, 1140px\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span class=\"media-credits-inline\">Felipe Alves Elias\u2009\/\u2009Paleozoobr<\/span>Illustration of <em>Xenocynus crypticus<\/em>, similar to the present-day big-eared opossum<span class=\"media-credits\">Felipe Alves Elias\u2009\/\u2009Paleozoobr<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<p>Around 55 million years ago, a marsupial of a similar size to a big-eared opossum (<em>Didelphis aurita<\/em>) lived in what is now Itabora\u00ed, a municipality in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro. Based on tooth and dental arch analysis, researchers from the federal universities of Pernambuco (UFPE), Goi\u00e1s (UFG), and Uberl\u00e2ndia (UFU) described a new genus and a species of metatherium, a group that includes marsupials, which they <em>named Xenocynus crypticus <\/em>(crypticus<em>, <\/em>meaning hidden in Latin, due to the fact that parts of the skull were left at Rio\u2019s Earth Sciences Museum in the 1960s and were only rediscovered in 2017). Considered large in comparison to other metatherians, the animal is estimated to have weighed around 1.5 kilograms. It fed on invertebrates and small vertebrates, like another marsupial still found in Brazil: the big lutrine opossum (<em>Lutreolina crassicaudata<\/em>). The Itabora\u00ed sedimentary basin was home to the most diverse metatherium fauna known in the world \u2014 to date, 43 species of metatherium have been found there. \u201cFifty-five million years ago, the Itabora\u00ed basin was a tropical rainforest, similar to the Amazon today,\u201d explains UFPE\u2019s Leonardo Carneiro, lead author of the study (<em>Journal of South American Earth Sciences<\/em>, July).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Large marsupial lived in Itabora\u00ed (Rio de Janeiro) 55 million years ago","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1651],"tags":[206,255],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-540559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes","tag-biodiversity","tag-paleontology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540560,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540559\/revisions\/540560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540559"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=540559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}