Like a hairless ‘dog’ that laid eggs: the oldest ancestor of mammals is found in Mallorca

Around 270 million years ago, the territory of what we know as Mallorca was not an island and was not taken over by tourists: it was part of the supercontinent Pangea and four-legged creatures, one meter long, ran on it. an appearance as strange to our eyes as its name: the gorgonopsians.

Based on fossil remains found in a site located in the municipality of Banyalbufar, in the Serra de Tramuntana, an international research team led by the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) and the Museu Balear de Ciències Naturals (MUCBO | MBCN) has described this animal from the saber-toothed lineage that would end up giving rise to mammals 50 million years later.

“It is, most likely, the oldest gorgonopsian on the planet,” he comments. Joseph Fortunysenior author of the article. “It is at least 270 million years old and the other records of this group worldwide are slightly younger.”


A super predator without ears

Gorgonopsians looked like a dog, but without ears or hair. Like today’s mammals, they were warm-blooded animals but, unlike most of these, they laid eggs. They were carnivores and were the first animals to develop the characteristic saber teeth, so they were often the top predators in the ecosystems where they lived.


In a work published this Tuesday in the magazine Nature Communicationsthe authors describe the large number of bone remains found at the site, from skull fragments, vertebrae, ribs, to a very well preserved femur. “When we started this excavation, we never thought we would find so many remains of an animal of this type in Mallorca,” he says. Rafel Matamalesco-author of the article.

Among the excavated fossil remains, an almost complete leg stands out, which has made it possible to study how the animal moved. Gorgonopsians had their legs arranged more vertically than reptiles and moved in a way that would be halfway between their legs and that of mammals, a very efficient system for walking and especially for running.

Hunting reptiles in the ponds

Thanks to the recovered saber teeth, scientists have been able to partially reconstruct their diet. “We know that it is a carnivorous animal, a characteristic that gorgonopsians share throughout the world,” he says. Angel GalobartICP researcher. “Saber teeth are a common feature in large predators in ecosystems, and the one we found was surely the same in the environment in which it lived.”


During the Permian, this area of ​​Pangea was at an equatorial latitude, and the climate was monsoonal, alternating wet seasons with very dry seasons. Researchers believe that the site where the fossils were found was a floodplain with temporary pools.

Potential saber-toothed prey came to drink in these humid areas, such as the moradisaurine captorhinids, herbivorous reptiles among which is the well-known Tramuntanasaurus tiai, which was also identified by ICP researchers. The authors believe that, in these pools, the gorgonopsians crouched and trapped these large lizards to feed, formalizing a scene that their mammal descendants would repeat again and again millions of years later.

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