The elongated skull of a marten dubbed ’Martes’ sansaniensis from the Hammerschmiede site (left) compared with the skull of today’s pine marten (Martes martes).
The elongated skull of a marten dubbed 'Martes' sansaniensis from the Hammerschmiede site ( left ) compared with the skull of today's pine marten (Martes martes) . An international team of researchers reports that at least 20 species of carnivorous mammals lived 11.5 million years ago in what is now the Hammerschmiede fossil site in southern Germany. The site has been a focus of attention since the 2019 discovery of the first known ape to walk upright, Danuvius guggenmosi . The current Hammerschmiede team includes Nikolaos Kargopoulos and other colleagues from the University of , researchers from Zaragoza and Barcelona, and Professor Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of. Their study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE . The recent excavations, led by Professor Madelaine Böhme, have uncovered an extraordinary diversity of fossil animals and plants, including more than 350 individual finds of mammalian carnivores. Many of them were semi-aquatic, living and hunting on land and in the water; or they spent much of their time in trees.
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