Photo of the day - Cute Insect-Murdering Mammal Had Roots in Dinosaur Age

 Hundreds of years ago, hungry barn owls gobbled down small mammals called Nesophontes  and regurgitated pellets of their remains. That mammal is now extinct,  but a genetic analysis of the owl pellets reveals how it evolved from  some of the earliest mammals approximately 70 million years ago. Nesophontes  was a genus of insect-eating critters that lived on the Caribbean  islands, including Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and the Cayman Islands.  They were small, just between 0.3 and 4.4 ounces. (10 and 125 grams),  and although their name hints at something sinister — it roughly  translates to "island murder" in Greek — that's likely due to how many  insects they devoured, the researchers said.The Nesophontes  genus includes eight species, the last of which went extinct about 500  years ago when the Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, accompanied by  the invasive black rats (Rattus rattus) that lived on their boats, the researchers said 

 Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/cute-insect-murdering-mammal-had-roots-dinosaur-age-132154474.html