The New York Times’ Trilobites column has a piece about the discovery of a new mammal from the late Jurassic of England. It’s called Novaculadon mirabilis, from novacula, the Latin word for razor for its sharp teeth.  The animal was about the size of a mouse and lived about 145 million years ago around what is now Dorset, England.  At that time, Dorset was beach front property as it is today.  You can find more details in the paper “A new multituberculate (Mammalia, Allotheria) from the Lulworth Formation (Cretaceous, Berriasian) of Dorset, England”, which was published in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association.

The Novaculadon specimen was discovered in a rock on the Dorset beach. Its full jawbone was found with the majority of its teeth intact, including a robust incisor and premolars, though it lacked the molars. Scientists used X-ray computed tomography to digitally isolate the teeth without the risk of damaging the delicate fossil.

The fossil was so complete that researchers knew almost immediately they had found something new. The jawbone was part of a skeleton of an animal that most likely died nearby and hadn’t been damaged in transport by rivers or other bodies of water.

This is the first substantially complete multituberculate jaw found since the 1850s, when Samuel Beckles, a lawyer and aspiring dinosaur hunter, undertook a large-scale excavation, exposing a bed in a limestone formation now known as the Purbeck Group. It resulted in the discovery of several mammal species as well as turtles, crocodiles and herbivorous dinosaurs. The newly discovered fossil came from a layer above Beckles’s findings, which showed that it was younger than those found over 170 years ago.