WASHINGTON: Just as dinosaurs started getting really big 150 million years ago, a little rat-sized mammal scurried around eating termites, US scientists reported on Thursday.

They found the fossil of a completely new type of animal in Colorado, and said it apparently resembled an armadillo and would have eaten bugs. But the fossil animal, named Fruitafossor windscheffelia, is not related to anything alive today and shows that anteaters, armadillos and other creatures that dig up insects evolved their specialized abilities several times during the history of the world.

This is known as convergent evolution.

Zhe-Xi Luo and John Wible of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh said the mammal’s limbs and hollow teeth resembled those of some of today’s specialized termite-eaters, including aardvarks, anteaters and armadillos.

“The dental convergence of Fruitafossor to modern armadillos suggests its diet may include termites, other insects, invertebrates, and even plants,” they wrote in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Termites and their close relatives had evolved millions of years before Fruitafossor lived, they said.

Like anteaters, the Fruitafossor had tube-like teeth because it would have sucked in and swallowed its prey virtually whole, Luo and Wible found.

—Reuters