Sabre-toothed predator migrated 11,000km amid mass extinction 252 million years ago

The way that carnivores went extinct first has parallels with the present day, according to scientists

Giant gorgonopsian Inostrancevia with its dicynodont prey, scaring off the much smaller African species Cyonosaurus. Matt Celeskey.

A tiger-sized predator moved thousands of kilometres across a supercontinent around the time of a mass extinction event more than 250 million years ago, fossils from South Africa reveal.

The discoveries show that the sabre-toothed animal, called Inostrancevia, migrated 11,000km through the Pangaea supercontinent from present-day Russia to what is now South Africa, filling a gap after other predators there went extinct.

Inostrancevia made its long journey at a time when many species were disappearing as the world faced devastating climate change caused by huge volcanic eruptions.

Scientists say that the extinctions taking place at the time mirror present-day events, as species struggle to survive amid habitat loss and climate change.

About 90 per cent of species went extinct in the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian geological period, one of five mass extinctions in the fossil record.

In comments released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pia Viglietti, of the Field Museum in Chicago and one of the co-authors of a new study about Inostrancevia in Current Biology, said that all of the top predators in South Africa went extinct well before the end of the Permian.

“We learnt that this vacancy in the niche was occupied, for a brief period, by Inostrancevia,” she added.

The extinctions that made up the Great Dying are thought to have happened over a period of up to a million years.

Until the recent discovery, Inostrancevia had been found only in Russia, but examinations of the fossil record of the Karoo Basin in South Africa by Christian Kammerer, of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, identified two large predatory mammals unusual for the region.

“When we reviewed the ranges and ages of the other top predators normally found in the area … with these Inostrancevia fossils, we found something quite exciting,” Dr Viglietti said.

“The local carnivores actually went extinct quite a bit before even the main extinction that we see in the Karoo – by the time the extinction begins in other animals, they're gone.”

Scientists are unsure how Inostrancevia travelled from Russia to South Africa or how long the journey took.

The creature, a type of gorgonopsian, a group of proto-mammals that included the first sabre-toothed predators, had skin similar to that of an elephant or a rhinoceros and looked slightly reptilian despite being related to present-day mammals.

The Permian geological period was followed by the Triassic, which is noted for the arrival in the fossil record of dinosaurs, which existed for about 165 million years before disappearing during another mass extinction.

During a period of about two million years around the time of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, there was a change in which animals were the apex predators four times, according to Dr Kammerer, the new study’s first author. He described these changes as “unprecedented in the history of life on land”.

“This underlines how extreme this crisis was, with even fundamental roles in ecosystems in extreme flux,” he added.

The vulnerability of top predators at the end of the Permian is mirrored by the situation today, with Dr Kammerer saying that large carnivores showed “high extinction risk”, being among the first animals to disappear because of hunting or habitat destruction.

“Think about wolves in Europe or tigers in Asia, species which tend to be slow to reproduce and grow and require large geographic areas to roam and hunt prey, and which are now absent from most of their historic ranges,” he said.

“We should expect that ancient apex predators would have had similar vulnerabilities, and would be among the species that first go extinct during mass extinction events.”

With many species, ranging from top predators to insects and plants, having disappeared because of human activity, scientists often say that we are in the middle of the world’s sixth mass extinction.

Dr Viglietti said the Permian was “basically a parallel of what we’re going through now”.

“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, we know what to do and how to stop it from happening,” she said.