Carnivorous dinosaurs have a reputation as the most terrifying beasts to ever walk the face of the Earth. But tens of millions of years before them, another mega-predator roamed the forests of South America. The recently discovered reptile, baptized by scientists as Pampaphoneus biccai, was a terror of forests 40 million years before the first direct ancestors of T-Rex appeared.
Perfectly preserved fossils of a predator were discovered in São Gabriel, Brazil. Paleontologists described the new species in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. The unusual fossil includes the animal’s complete skull, as well as parts of its ribs and arm bones. This is an extremely rich resource of information about an extinct species. Paleontologists often have to content themselves with finding individual skeletal elements of extinct animals.
Pampaphoneus was a therapsid. An ancient group of animals, which included, among others: ancestors of today’s mammals. He lived just before the largest extinction event in Earth’s history, which wiped out 86% of all animal species in the world. The subgroup of therapsids to which it belonged, dinocephalians, were most likely warm-blooded animals with large heads covered with characteristic appendages. These animals are known from excavations in Africa and Asia, but are rare in other parts of the world. Pampaphoneus biccai is the only species known in Brazil.
“The fossil was found in the rocks of the Middle Permian, in an area where bones are not common, but we often discover pleasant surprises in them,” states Mateus A. Costa Santos, a graduate of the Laboratory of Paleontology at the Federal University of Pampa (UNIPAMPA). “Finding the skull of Pampaphoneus was extremely important in expanding our knowledge of an animal that was previously difficult to distinguish from its Russian relatives.”
Paleontologists from UNIPAMPA and the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) excavated the fossils during a month of painstaking field work. Due to the pandemic, it took an additional three years to clean and thoroughly examine the fossils.
“This animal must have caused pure fear in everything that got in its way,” says the co-author of the discovery, Prof. Stephanie E. Pierce of the Department of Organic and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology and mammalogy at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. “Its discovery is key to providing insight into the structure of terrestrial ecosystems just before the worst mass extinction of all time. It is a spectacular find that demonstrates the global importance of the Brazilian fossil record.”
The new specimen is only the second Pampaphoneus skull discovered in South America. It is also larger than the first and provides unprecedented information about the animal’s appearance thanks to the unique preservation of the bones.
“Pampaphoneus played the same ecological role as modern big cats,” Pinheiro emphasizes. “It was the largest known land predator from the Permian in South America. The animal had large, sharp canines adapted to catching prey. Its teeth and skull architecture suggest that its bite was so powerful that the animal was able to bite through bones, similar to modern “hyenas”.
The Pampaphoneus skull described by scientists is the largest ever found intact. It is almost 40 cm long, although researchers suspect that another fossil found earlier, which has not yet been assigned to any species, could have come from an individual almost twice as large.
Scientists estimate that the largest individuals of Pampaphoneus could reach almost three meters in length and weigh about 400 kg. The predator probably preyed on small and medium-sized animals. In the same place where the fossil was found, some of its potential victims were also identified, such as the small dicynodont Rastodon and the giant amphibian Konzhukovia.
2023-12-31 12:00:00
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