Reconstruction of the oldest known Gorgonopsian
Henry Sutherland Sharpe
The oldest known saber-toothed animal hunted large prey 270 million years ago, and newly discovered remains could help shed light on how early mammalian relatives became warm-blooded.
The the first land predators they usually hunted relatively small prey. But things changed about 273 million years ago, when an event known as the Olson Extinction shook ecosystems around the world. Then much larger terrestrial herbivores began to appear, and they needed predators new weapons to send such great booty, says he Joseph Fortuny Barcelona’s Miquel Crusafont at the Palaeontology Institute of Catalonia.
This may help explain why the partial fossilized skeleton of an ancient predator – recently discovered by Fortuny and his colleagues on the Spanish island of Mallorca – had saber teeth. These blows are better at wounding large prey than at grabbing and holding smaller animals. “It was the first opportunity to have this type of tool to catch herbivores,” says Fortuny.
At around 270 million years old, it is the oldest member of a known group of carnivores. gorgonopsiansall of whom had saber teeth. The largest gorgonopsians were several meters long and had 15 cm canine teeth. The Mallorcan gorgonopsia was smaller, with a body length of one meter and dogs barely 5 centimeters. Fortuny says researchers are waiting to examine the bones and teeth in more detail before naming the new gorgonopsian.
The ancient predator is significant for more than just its age. When he visited Mallorca, the island was in the tropics supercontinent Called Pangea, but all previously known gorgonopsian fossils come from areas of the world that existed at high latitudes 270 million years ago. The new discovery suggests that gorgonopsians actually originated closer to the equator.
Adaptations they developed there, including their ability to efficiently hunt large prey, may have allowed them to begin controlling their body temperature, allowing them to expand into cooler habitats far from the equator.
Understanding more about this process is important, Fortuny says, because gorgonopsians were therapsids. a group of animals that also includes mammals. “There is a lot of debate about the early steps of thermoregulation in this group,” he says.
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