Inostrancevia was a tiger-sized, saber-toothed gorgonopsian that lived on the supercontinent Pangea during the Permian period, approximately 252 million years ago. The new fossil discovery in South Africa suggests that Inostrancevia migrated 11,300 km (7,000 miles) across Pangea, filling a gap in a faraway ecosystem that had lost its top predators, before going extinct itself.
“All the big top predators in the Late Permian in South Africa went extinct well before the end-Permian mass extinction,” said Dr. Pia Viglietti, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of the Witwatersrand.
“We learned that this vacancy in the niche was occupied, for a brief period, by Inostrancevia.”
Inostrancevia was a gorgonopsian, a group of proto-mammals that included the first saber-toothed predators on the planet.
The animal was about the size of a tiger and likely had skin like an elephant or a rhino.
While vaguely reptilian in appearance, it was part of the group of animals that includes modern mammals.
Prior to the new study, Inostrancevia had only ever been found in Eastern Europe.
But while examining the fossil record of South Africa’s Karoo Basin, the authors identified the fossils of two large predatory animals that were different from those normally found in the region.
“The fossils themselves were quite unexpected. It’s not clear how they made it from what’s now Eastern Europe, or how long it took them to cross Pangea and arrive in what’s now South Africa,” Dr. Viglietti said.
“But being far from home was just one element of what made the fossils special.”
“When we reviewed the ranges and ages of the other top predators normally found in the area, the rubidgeine gorgonopsians, with these Inostrancevia fossils, we found something quite exciting.”
“The local carnivores actually went extinct quite a bit before even the main extinction that we see in the Karoo — by the time the extinction begins in other…
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