The critter, which hunted salamanders in the freshwater lakes and rivers of what is now Inner Mongolia, China, lived during the mid-Jurassic between 168 million and 163 million years ago. It seems to be the earliest known mammal-type animal that lived a semiaquatic life.
The furry predator had a mix of features seen in modern-day animals, with a broad, flattened tail that marks it as a powerful swimmer, and short hind legs with relatively long feet.
But the teeth "are definitely not like a platypus," Luo said. It possessed robust canines and shearing cheek-teeth that would cut and chew meat in a different way from modern carnivorous mammals. "It's a predator with gigantic and very specialized canines," Luo said. "So, it's partly otter-like and partly platypus-like."
A revealing fossil
The fossil of Megacauda sungei, highlighting its bones and soft tissue. (Image credit: Luo et al., Nature (2026))He added that M. sungei may have sheltered in burrows on land in the temperate plant-filled climate, and hunted in lakes and rivers for fish and invertebrates.
M. sungei seems to have had the apparatus needed to do this, study co-author Thomas Martin, a paleontologist at the University of Bonn in Germany, told Live Science.
Finding this in M. sungei suggests that the apparatus needed for suckling milk and swallowing had already evolved by the Middle Jurassic (around 174 million to 164 million years ago), Martin said.
"Now we push the history of it back to before the split of modern marsupials and modern eutherian [placental] mammals," Luo said.
M. sungei is from an extinct lineage of docodonts, which are relatives of mammals from the dinosaur-dominated Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, living between about 200 million and 120 million years ago.
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If anything, the newly described "spectacular fossil" shows that docodonts were wide-ranging during the dinosaur age, Hand told Live Science in an email.
"This very detailed study adds to accumulating evidence that mammaliaforms occupied a wide range of ecological niches long before the evolution of living mammals," Hand said.
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