Fossils of a saber-toothed top predator reveal a scramble for dominance leading up to 'the Great Dying'
Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, Earth experienced a mass extinction so devastating that it's become known as "the Great Dying." Massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate change, killing off nine out of every ten species and eventually setting the stage for the dinosaurs. But the Great Dying was a long goodbye— the extinction event took place over the course of up to a million years at the end of the Permian period. During that time, the fossil record shows drama and upheaval as species fought to get a foothold in their changing environments. One animal that exemplifies this instability was a tiger-sized, saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia: a new fossil discovery suggests that Inostrancevia migrated 7,000 miles across the supercontinent Pangaea, filling a gap in a faraway ecosystem that had lost its top predators, before going extinct itself.