Ancient saber-toothed predator found in Spain is the oldest of its kind
Before dinosaurs walked the Earth and tens of millions of years before the first mammals appeared, distant mammal relatives with long, serrated canine teeth were the dominant carnivores on land. Called gorgonopsians, the earliest animals in this lineage have long been missing from the fossil record. But the discovery of a newly identified gorgonopsian — the oldest saber-toothed animal ever found — is filling a longstanding blank space in the group’s history.
These slender predators are known mostly from bones that are less than 270 million years old, вавада сайт but the recent fossil find is thought to be an unprecedented 280 million to 270 million years old.