paleontologist recently spotted a suspiciously bare patch of land on a Brazilian farm on Google Maps , and they headed out to fag for fossils . This terrifying - looking creature , a dog - sized predator that ruled 260 million years ago , is the awe-inspiring result .
Discovered in the pampas plains of southern Brazil , this marauder has been dubbed Pampaphoneus biccai . The creature would have been one of the most direful predators of the Permian Period , at least 30 million years before the first dinosaur emerged . Based on its razor - crisp , serrated tooth , the creature was hyper - carnivorous , mean at least 70 % of its food came from meat .
projection loss leader Juan Carlos Cisneros key it as “ a variety between a tiger and a Komodo dragon ” , and remarkably it ’s actually more closely related to the tiger than the Komodo flying lizard , despite its apparently reptilian lineament .
Though Pampaphoneus biccai was n’t a mammal , it was what ’s known as a dinocephalian protomammal , who were evolutionary cousin-german of what eventually became mammalian . So , in evolutionary term , we can look at Pampaphoneus biccai a sort of ancient , homicidal , meat - obsess with child - uncle , which is fairly much all I look for in a great - uncle anyway .
Over at Cosmic Log , Alan Boyle hassome more detailson this ancient predator :
The specimen is from the Permian period , more than 260 million year ago . The complete skull measure about 13 inches ( 35 centimeters ) in duration and was discovered in 2008 during a scientific dig on a farm in the pampas region of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil … The skull suggest that this South American species was a stuffy relative to interchangeable dinocephalians previously found in Russia and South Africa . That supports the approximation that therapsids were capable to disperse easily from one part of the Pangaea supercontinent to the other , during an age when most of Earth ’s modern - daylight land masses were linked together .
Original paper atPNAS . ViaCosmic LogandDiscovery News . Artist ’s conception by Voltaire Neto .
PaleontologyScience
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