Silvacola is an extinct genus of mammals belonging to the family Erinaceidae, which also contains the modern hedgehogs and gymnures. It lived in North America during the Early Eocene, about 50 million years ago. It was just long, roughly the length of an adult thumb. It is the smallest erinaceid ever found and comparable in size to some of today's shrews.
Silvacola is an extinct genus of mammals belonging to the family Erinaceidae, which also contains the modern hedgehogs and gymnures. It lived in North America during the Early Eocene, about 50 million years ago. It was just long, roughly the length of an adult thumb. It is the smallest erinaceid ever found and comparable in size to some of today's shrews.
The teeth suggest it was an omnivore that probably ate insects and plants it found on the forest floor.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).