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This is a huge week for the paleontology and gas station mascot communities, because researchers at the University of Texas’s Jackson School Museum of Earth History announced they have identified a new ancient species of beaver—and they’re naming it in honor of our state’s beloved bucktoothed, red-capped nugget salesman, Buc-ee (yes, I know his name is technically Bucky, but I think that’s dumb and it’s something I’m trying to forget). On Monday, research associate Steve May and Vertebrate Paleontology Collections director Matthew Brown released a paper about a Miocene-era rodent fossil of a species they have christened Anchitheriomys buceei, or A. buceei for short, proving that those billboards are right: Texas is beaver country, and has been for at least 15 million years. Further sweetening the…

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