A new study reveals a fossilized creature found in Mallorca, Spain, dating back 280-270 million years, potentially making it the oldest known saber-toothed predator.
Paleontologists have revealed what may be the earliest known saber-toothed animal to have ever lived—a predator that roamed our planet before the age of the dinosaurs.In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers describe a previously unknown prehistoric creature that would have been vaguely dog-like in appearance, albeit with noticeable differences.
'If you saw this animal walking down the street, it would look a little bit like a medium-sized dog, maybe about the size of a husky, but it wouldn't be quite right. It didn't have any fur, and it wouldn't have had dog-like ears,' study co-author Ken Angielczyk, with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said in a press release.Among its most distinctive features were a set of very long, blade-like, canine teeth, which suggest the animal was a 'top predator' in its day, according to Angielczyk.The creature—which long predates the first true mammals, as well as the dinosaurs—is described based on a fossil specimen found on the Spanish island of Mallorca, located in the Mediterranean Sea.Remarkably, the fossil seems to date to around 280-270 million years ago—when Mallorca formed part of the supercontinent Pangea—making it, most likely, the oldest known member of a group of extinct animals known as the gorgonopsians. These are prehistoric mammal relatives that lived during the Permian period (around 299-252 million years ago) of Earth's history.Modern mammals belong to a larger group of tetrapods (four-limbed animals with backbones) called Synapsida. Mammals (known scientifically as Mammalia) are the only living synapsids, having first evolved around 200 million years ago. But there are many extinct groups of so-called non-mammalian synapsid
PALEONTOLOGY SABER TOOTH FOSSIL PREDATOR PANGEA
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