In many technical papers describing fossil creatures, artists give readers a glimpse of prehistory through reconstructions of what those animals might have looked like in life. Not so with Pucadelphys andinus. In a paper published this week in Nature, artist S. Fernandez depicted a pair of the possum-like creatures at a critical point in their individual histories – just after death but before their soft tissues were stripped away to leave behind only fossilized bones.

The reason why Fernandez restored the small, fuzzy mammals right up to the point of death has everything to do with the way the creatures died. For the most part, the fossil record of small mammals consists of teeth and bits of jaw. Complete skeletons are