Inostrancevia, a creature with tough skin like a rhino's, migrated 7,000 miles across the ancient supercontinent Pangaea and briefly dominated what is now South Africa before going extinct.
At the dawn of the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history 252 million years ago, species fought tooth and nail to survive in the changing environment. Ancient predators in particular, struggled ruthlessly to stay at the top of the food chain.
"All the big top predators in the late Permian in South Africa went extinct well before the end-Permian mass extinction," Pia Viglietti, a research scientist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago who participated in the discovery, said in a statement."We learned that this vacancy in the niche was occupied, for a brief period, by Inostrancevia."
Once there, it replaced a group of endemic predators called the rubidgeines — a subset of gorgonopsians that had a large snout and blade-like canines. The local carnivores of Karoo went extinct"quite a bit" before the Great Dying truly set in, Viglietti said. Due to their large body sizes, slow maturation rates and low population densities, top predators are often some of the first species to disappear during mass extinction events.
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