By Susan Milius
LAS VEGAS – Blessed with a hidden chamber in their oversized skulls, extinct giant beavers may have created a unique Ice Age call of the wild.
Detailed CT scans reveal a dead-end passageway leading from the back of the animal’s skull toward its face. That chamber connects via a long, narrow slit to another passage going straight through the beaver’s skull from throat to nose, vertebrate paleontologist Caroline Rinaldi reported November 2 at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
“I don’t know of any other animal that has this,” said Rinaldi, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.
Estimates of how big an animal the beaver Castoroides ohioensiswas have ranged from a sizeable 60 kilograms on up to the bulk of modern black bear. The last giant beaver died roughly 10,000 years ago, about the time many supersized creatures of the last Ice Age went extinct.