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Extinct 'Hobbit' creature the size of a house cat discovered in Wyoming dig site

jfengel 2021-08-19 13:40:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Subheading is less clickbaity: Meet Beornus honeyi — but you can call him Beorn.

And the paragraph that explains it:

"I have always been a huge Tolkien fan, and there is a long-standing tradition of naming early Paleocene mammals after Tolkien characters," Madelaine Atteberry, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of a new study on B. honeyi and its relatives, told Live Science in an email. "I chose Beornus honeyi because of the large size and 'inflated' appearance of its teeth compared to the other mammals from this time period."

hardlianotion 2021-08-19 06:44:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Not a hobbit though, and that’s what this punter was here to see.

southeastern 2021-08-19 07:22:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Sorry to hear that, hopefully this can be some consolation

>LB1's height is estimated to have been 1.06 m (3 ft 6 in). The height of a second skeleton, LB8, has been estimated at 1.09 m (3 ft 7 in) based on tibial length.[4] These estimates are outside the range of normal modern human height and considerably shorter than the average adult height of even the smallest modern humans, such as the Mbenga and Mbuti at 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis

They (maybe) really did exist (sort of)