280 million years ago, in what is now a quiet beach in Mallorca, there was a saber-toothed predator the size of a medium-sized dog. It was faster than any reptile of its time, walked on almost vertical legs, and was the deadliest carnivore of its era. Its fossil—fragments of skull, vertebrae, ribs, and a femur—was recovered in Banyalbufar, in the Serra de Tramuntana, and published in December 2024 in the journal Nature Communications.
The animal belongs to the gorgonopsids, the group that would give rise to mammals, including humans. The problem: previous records of these animals dated to 265 million years ago and came from Russia and South Africa. This fossil pushes back that evolutionary clock by between 15 and 20 million years, according to the team led by Josep Fortuny, from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont.
At that time, Mallorca was not an island but part of Pangaea, the single supercontinent, located near the equator. What is now a tourist destination was, 280 million years ago, the territory of one of the most primitive predators in our own evolutionary history. 🦷