Paleontologists from UChicago use CT scanning and software simulations to show how a 250-million-year-old mammal predecessor could hear like modern mammals. 

The sense of smell is vital for animals, as it helps them find food, protect themselves from predators and interact socially. An international research team led by Dr Quentin Martinez and Dr Eli Amson from State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart has now discovered that certain areas of the brain skull allow conclusions to be drawn about the sense of smell in mammals. Particularly significant is the volume of the endocast of the olfactory bulb, a bony structure in the skull that is often well preserved even in very old fossils. This volume is closely related to the number of intact odour receptor genes – an important indicator of olfactory ability. This allows the sense of smell to be estimated even in extinct species such as early whales, sabre-toothed cats or the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine. The study, which provides a reliable method for reconstructing the sense of smell in extinct mammals, was published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS).