The strange animal that crossed a continent to try to escape the Great Death

2023-05-22 17:05:21

252 million years ago, the Earth experienced a mass extinction so devastating that it is known as ‘the Great Dying’. Massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate change, killing nine out of ten species and probably setting the stage for dinosaurs to reign. But the Great Dying was not an instantaneous event, rather it lasted for around a million years at the end of the Permian period. During that interval, the animals struggled to survive in changing and unstable environments. One of them was a tiger-sized saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia. Fossils found in South Africa reveal that this strange mammal with elephant skin and a reptilian face traveled 11,000 km across the supercontinent Pangea, from what is now Russia, to try to find a habitat to dominate before becoming extinct.

“Inostrancevia was a gorgonopsian, a group of protomammals that included the planet’s earliest saber-toothed predators,” says Pia Viglietti, a research scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the new study in ‘Current Biology’. Despite its vaguely reptilian appearance, it was part of the group of animals that includes modern mammals.

unexpected fossils

Before the new study, Inostrancevia had only been found in Russia. But while examining the fossil record of South Africa’s Karoo Basin, paleontologists identified fossils of two large predatory animals that were different from those normally found in the region. “The fossils themselves were quite unexpected,” says Viglietti. It is not clear how they got from what is now Russia, or how long it took them to cross Pangea and reach the lands that are now South Africa. But there was something else.

“When we looked at the ranges and ages of the other top predators typically found in the area, the rubidgeine gorgonopsians, With these fossils from Inostrancevia, we found something quite exciting,” says the researcher. »The local carnivores actually went extinct a bit before even the main extinction that we see in the Karoo: when the extinction starts in other animals, they are gone«.

The arrival of Inostrancevia from 7,000 miles away and its subsequent extinction indicates that these large predators were “canaries in the coal mine” for the larger extinction event to come.

“This demonstrates that the South African Karoo Basin continues to produce data critical to understanding the most catastrophic mass extinction in Earth’s history,” says co-author Jennifer Botha, Director of the GENUS Center of Excellence in Paleosciences and Professor at the Institute for Evolutionary Studies. from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

“We have shown that the shift in which groups of animals occupied roles of top predators occurred four times in less than two million years around the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which is unprecedented in the history of life on Earth.” land. This underscores just how extreme this crisis was,” says Christian Kammerer, the study’s first author, research curator of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and research associate at the Field Museum.

The vulnerability of these large predators matches what we see today. “Apex predators in modern environments tend to display a high risk of extinction and tend to be among the first species to be locally extirpated due to human-mediated activities such as hunting or habitat destruction,” says Kammerer. “Think of wolves in Europe or tigers in Asia, species that tend to be slow to reproduce and grow and require large geographic areas to roam and hunt prey, and are now absent from most of their historical ranges. We should expect that ancient apex predators would have had similar vulnerabilities and would be among the species to go extinct first during mass extinction events,” she continues.

In addition to shedding new light on the extinction event that contributed to the rise of the dinosaurs, Viglietti says the study is important for what it can teach us about the ecological disasters the planet is currently experiencing.

“It’s always good to get a better understanding of how mass extinction events affect ecosystems, especially since the Permian is basically a parallel to what we’re going through now,” Viglietti stresses. “We really don’t have modern analogues for what to expect with the mass extinction happening today, and the Permo-Triassic mass extinction event represents one of the best examples of what we could experience with our climate crisis and extinctions. I guess the only difference is that we know what to do and how to prevent it from happening.”