Jan. 12, 2009 -- In just four years, the Isle of Wight, otherwise known as "Dinosaur Island," has yielded the remains of 48 new animal species, including eight new dinosaurs, six dino-era mammals, and many different types of lizards, frogs and salamanders.

Watch video about the strange phenomenon of dinosaur mummification.

Together, the finds shed light on what life was like when dinosaurs dominated the planet.

All of the fossils were discovered by a resident of the island, Steve Sweetman, who is a research associate with the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. His latest paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, concerns one of his rarest finds -- the remains of a mammal that scurried around on the dinosaur-trampled ground.

"This new species, as is often the case with fossil mammals, is known only from isolated teeth," Sweetman told Discovery News.

"It is of interest not just because it is something new, but because it is a new species of a genus (Eobaatar) that is otherwise known from rocks of roughly the same age occurring in Spain and slightly younger deposits in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia," he added.