![]() ![]() But while examining the fossil record of South Africa's Karoo Basin, Viglietti's colleague Christian Kammerer identified the fossils of two large predatory animals that were different from those normally found in the region. Prior to this new paper, Inostrancevia had only ever been found in Russia. It 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. The prehistoric creature looked the part of "top predator." "Inostrancevia was a gorgonopsian, a group of proto-mammals that included the first saber-toothed predators on the planet," says Viglietti. We learned that this vacancy in the niche was occupied, for a brief period, by Inostrancevia," says Pia Viglietti, a research scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago and a co-author of the new study in Current Biology. "All the big top predators in the late Permian in South Africa went extinct well before the end-Permian mass extinction. One animal that exemplifies this instability was a tiger-sized, saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia: a new fossil discovery suggests that Inostrancevia migrated 7,000 miles across the supercontinent Pangaea, filling a gap in a faraway ecosystem that had lost its top predators, before going extinct itself. During that time, the fossil record shows drama and upheaval as species fought to get a foothold in their changing environments. But the Great Dying was a long goodbye - the extinction event took place over the course of up to a million years at the end of the Permian period. Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, Earth experienced a mass extinction so devastating that it's become known as "the Great Dying." Massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate change, killing off nine out of every ten species and eventually setting the stage for the dinosaurs. ![]()
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