Nature has a story about a sabre-toothed mammal.  Fossils of a new large protomammal have been discovered in South Africa.  Inostrancevia africana lived about 251.9 million years ago in what is now the Karoo Basin.  This gorgonopsid was described in a paper recently published in the journal Current Biology.

Jennifer Botha, professor at the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, is co-author of the study, published in Current Biology. She says “this new species of gorgonopsian, Inostrancevia africana, is the most recent to be identified. Our study shows extreme instability in the top predator niches around the extinction, with four major shifts within a span of roughly two million years, beginning before the main extinction event began.”

The extinction is linked to volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Traps in what is now Russia. Chemicals, ash and soot would have changed the atmosphere making survival very difficult.

“Our research suggests that the terrestrial end-Permian extinction was more protracted than previously thought, lasting some one million years. There may have been several extinction pulses during this time, with increasingly difficult conditions. The gorgonopsians appear to be victims of the first extinction pulse.