Buc-ee’s is a treasure for all Texans — together with paleontologists, too.
A researcher from the University of Texas at Austin rediscovered a beaver that used to be sitting within the lab since 1941 and named it after a well-known Texas gasoline station, in step with KHOU11.
The beaver used to be named Anchitheriomys buceei, for brief “A. buceei” via Steve May, a researcher from UT Austin. May were given the muse for the title when he noticed the billboard of Buc-ee’s announcing, “This is beaver country” again in May 2020.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, it is a beaver country, and it has been for millions of years,’” he mentioned.
May describes a newly-discovered beaver in his paper printed within the Palaeontologia Electronica. A. buceei existed in Texas round 15 million years in the past — and is considered virtually the similar excluding in dimension. According to Matthew Brown, director of the Jackson School’s vertebrate paleontology collections, the traditional beaver weighed round 57 kilos. Compared to trendy beavers which weigh about 44 kilos, it used to be 30% larger.
A. buceei’s cranium used to be discovered within the East Texas hamlet of Burkeville via a group of Texas A&M University paleontologists in 1941. One paleontologist, Curtis Hesse, believed the cranium used to be from an unidentified creature. He attempted to call it however he handed sooner than doing so. After that, the cranium used to be forgotten and stayed in A&M’s assortment till it used to be moved to UT within the Eighties.
It used to be 40 years later that the cranium stuck May’s eye. “I was just going through cabinets one day, looking at specimens,” he says. “I opened a drawer and there was this very interesting-looking skull, and it just really struck me as, ‘Wow, that’s a really interesting fossil. I wonder what it is.’”
“New discoveries in the field capture lots of attention, but equally as valuable are the discoveries made in existing museum collections,” Brown mentioned. “We know that these opportunities are littered throughout the drawers in these cabinets.”
Here’s an editorial about World-Biggest Buc-ee’s on Local Profile if you have an interest.