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It’s hard for life to thrive in the far north. Most of the animals seen on the tundra today are hearty creatures, built to withstand the harsh environment. But tens millions of years ago, something else, something small, dominated the Arctic.
A new study published in May by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified fossil samples of three previously unknown species of multituberculates — an extinct rodent-like mammal group — in northern Alaska.
Sarah Shelley, a paleontologist and postdoctoral research associate at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, is one of the authors of the study.
“The Arctic isn't just this sort of evolutionary backwater,” she said. “A lot of things were going on there.”
The fossils, discovered in the Prince Creek Formation near the North Slope, are about 73 million years old. Shelley said the rodent-like animals outlasted even the dinosaurs.
“We hypothesized that because it lived in the Arctic, it might have had adaptations that allowed it to survive that or that lineage to survive the extinction,” she said.
The remarkable fossils needed a name. Shelley said the team started with an Inupiaq dictionary for inspiration. They looked for root words that described the characteristics of each species, distinctively known for their jagged, small teeth.
Shelley eventually connected with Gail Smithhisler, an Inupiaq language teacher in Nome.
Smithhisler described the process as a lot of back and forth.
“I was able to open up my resource documents, and kind of verify that, ‘okay, yeah, this seems appropriate’, or I would suggest maybe sticking with this root word, because you cut off a part of it, and it doesn't make sense after that,” she explained. “Then they take that into consideration.”
The three species are named Camurodon borealis, meaning “northern curved tooth”, Qayaqgruk peregrinus, or “little wandering hero”, and Kaniqsiqcosmodon polaris, meaning “polar frost ornamented tooth”.
Shelley said that the names aim to more broadly recognize the region where the animals were found.
“Historically, a lot of species have been named for people who are in the field sometimes who discovered them,” Shelley said. “There's been a big push to sort of move away from that now and actually recognize sort of beyond the people, [to] the regions they've come from."
It’s a more nuanced approach to science, and one that turned out to be deeply personal for Smithhisler.
“I was really close with my grandma. Inupiaq was her first language,” she said.
Smithhisler was told to keep her involvement under wraps until the research paper was published. But she decided to tell her grandmother, Edna Ahnangnatoguk, anyway. It was something Smithhisler knew she would be proud of.
“With my grandmother it was important to her that her family not be forgotten,” she explained.
She is credited in the study using the first documented spelling of her family name: “G. ‘Topkaruk’ Smithhisler”.
Her grandmother, lovingly known as “Gaga”, passed away in October 2024, before the study was published. But having the opportunity to tell her grandmother about this project Smithhisler said is something she is very grateful for.
“I feel very honored that I can grant my grandma's wish that her family isn't going to be forgotten,” she said. “It's a published document now, so her family name, her mom's name is always going to be memorialized in that way.”
Shelley’s team is still learning from and looking for more of the ancient fossils. If more are found, she said she suspects they’ll be back in touch with Smithhisler for more inspiration.
