Prehistoric Transylvanian mammal had red teeth

SMALL, with oversized blood-red incisors, and down the road from Dracula's lair to boot. To coincide with Halloween, we bring you Barbatodon transylvanicus, a 70-million-year-old mammal that scurried beneath the feet of dinosaurs. The discovery of a new skull, complete with teeth, gives the first clues to its diet.

Barbatodon lived in what is now Transylvania, Romania, about 200 kilometres from the castle of the bloodthirsty medieval prince Vlad Dracula. It was roughly the size of a rat and belonged to a little-known group of mammals called multituberculates that outlived the dinosaurs, then died out 35 million years ago.

Thierry Smith of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and Vlad Codrea of the University of Babes-Bolyai in Romania, who found the fossil, shown below, say that its red tooth enamel is 3 per cent iron, which probably made it more resistant to abrasion.

Smith presented the findings at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, last month.

So what did the diminutive mammal eat? In the new fossil, its teeth look most like those of some modern-day shrews. That suggests it may have been partial to a meal of insects. Not so much bloodsucker, then, as insect crusher.

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