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#FossilFriday time! This one is from my curator, Dr. Andy Farke. It’s a little beardog! If you have been to the Alf Museum or followed our social media, you’ve seen plenty of our big beardog (Amphicyon) skeleton and trackway. Beardogs, or amphicyonids, lived throughout the northern hemisphere and into Africa during much of the Cenozoic. Big beardogs evolved from earlier and smaller beardogs–this skull of Daphoenus was collected by Ray Alf and his students in western Nebraska, in rocks that date back to around 33 million years old. That’s around 15 million years before its much larger relative Amphicyon! Daphoenus was around the size of a modern coyote, quite a bit smaller than our grizzly-sized Amphicyon.

Fossil in the collections of the Alf Museum, RAM 6251. #fossil