This tiger-sized, saber-toothed, rhino-skinned predator thrived before the ‘Great Dying’
An artist’s illustration of the giant gorgonopsian Inostrancevia with its dicynodont prey, scaring off the much smaller African species Cyonosaurus. Matt Celeskey About 250 million years ago, massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate changes that killed 80 to 90 percent of species on Earth. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, or the “Great Dying,” paved the way for dinosaurs to dominate Earth, but was even worse than the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now, with a new fossil discovery described May 22 in the journal Current Biology, scientists believe that a tiger-sized, saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia migrated 7,000 miles across Pangea. When it arrived in the southern part of Pangea, Inostrancevia filled a gap in an ecosystem that was devoid of top predators before Inostrancevia too went...