Ancient saber-toothed predator found in Spain is the oldest of its kind
Before dinosaurs walked the Earth and tens of millions of years before the first mammals appeared, distant mammal relatives with long, serrated canine teeth were the dominant carnivores on land. Called gorgonopsians, the earliest animals in this lineage have long been missing from the fossil record. But the discovery of a newly identified gorgonopsian — the oldest saber-toothed animal ever found — is filling a longstanding blank space in the group’s history.
These slender predators are known mostly from bones that are less than 270 million years old, but the recent fossil find is thought to be an unprecedented 280 million to 270 million years old.
The newfound gorgonopsian adds to one of the earliest branches of the therapsid family tree — the Therapsida order includes not only gorgonopsians but also the ancestors of modern mammals and other nonmammalian groups that are now extinct.
The finding is a notable puzzle piece that could help shed light on the earliest forebears of mammals, experts said.
What is a gorgonopsian? It’s not a ‘lizard-dog’
Gorgonopsians vanished around 252 million years ago, and their lineage died with them. All gorgonopsians had daggerlike canine teeth, vavada top and species ranged widely in size. Some were as small as cats, while others were as big as polar bears.
Fossils of the newly described gorgonopsian included its knifelike canines; parts of its jaw; some vertebrae, ribs, tailbones and toe bones; and most of the bones from a hind limb, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
The specimen’s blunt-snouted skull was incomplete but is estimated to measure about 7 inches (18 centimeters) long, and the animal would have been as tall as a medium-size dog and weighed roughly 66 to 88 pounds (30 to 40 kilograms), according to study coauthor Ken Angielczyk, MacArthur Curator of Paleomammalogy at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
