Catopsbaatar
Catopsbaatar is a genus of multituberculate, an extinct order of rodent-like mammals. It lived in what is now Mongolia during the late Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous Period, about 72 million years ago. The first fossils were collected in the early 1970s, and the animal was named as a new species of the genus "Djadochtatherium " in 1974, "D. catopsaloides". The specific name refers to the animal's similarity to the genus "Catopsalis". The species was moved to the genus "Catopsalis" in 1979, and received its own genus ("Catopsbaatar", Greek and Mongolian for "visible hero") in 1994. Five skulls, one molar, and one skeleton with a skull are known; the latter is the genus' most complete specimen. "Catopsbaatar" was a member of the family Djadochtatheriidae.
History of Madagascar
Finally, a cutmarked pygmy hippo bone from Ambolisatra has been dated and calibrated to between 60 BCE and 130 CE (2 SDs), but it is from a coastal swamp without indications of settlement in a heavily karstic region. Moreover, a similar bone from the same collection from a nearby site gave two widely divergent dates of 2020 and 3495 BP (MacPhee & Burney 1991). Transient visits to Madagascar that did not result in enduring settlement cannot be ruled out, and may have left some traces.
Factual information about the peopling of Madagascar remains incomplete, but much recent multidisciplinary research and work in archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and history confirms that the Malagasy people were originally and overwhelmingly Austronesian peoples native to the Sunda Islands. They probably arrived on the west coast of Madagascar with outrigger canoes ("waka") at the beginning of our era or as much as 300 years sooner according to archaeologists, and perhaps even earlier under certain geneticists' assumptions. The Borobudur Ship Expedition in 2003–2004 affirmed scholars' ideas that ships from ancient Indonesia could have reached Madagascar and the west African coast for trade from the 8th century and after. A traditional Borobudur ship with outriggers was reconstructed and sailed in this expedition from Jakarta to Madagascar and Ghana. These pioneers are known in the Malagasy oral tradition as the "Ntaolo", from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian "*tau-ulu", literally "first men", from "*tau", "man", and "*ulu", "head", "first", "origin", "beginning". It is likely that those ancient people called themselves *"va-waka", "the canoe people" from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian "*va", "people", and "* waka"-"canoe". Today the term "vahoaka" means "people" in Malagasy.