That was a dire situation for the lives of living beings on Earth. Continuously increasing global warming triggered by calamitous volcanism in Siberia inflicted the worst mass extinction on record—90% species—around 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period.
About 66 million years ago, an asteroid ravaged the dinosaurs. This extinction event reopened over a protracted time lag, with a large number of species perishing in worsening condition. On Monday, scientists said that fossils unearthed in South Africa provide a peek into the drama or tale of an apex predator that, over multiple generations, migrated around the world.
A tiger-sized, sabre-toothed mammal forerunner known as Inostrancevia, yet only known fossils have been excavated in Russia’s northwestern corner of the Arctic Sea, and no new discoveries have taken place.
The fossils indicate that the Inostrancevia left its place of origin and trekked over hundreds and thousands of years about 7,000 miles to the ancient supercontinent Pangaea, at a time today known as united. Inostrancevia replaced the ecological niche of the top predator in South Africa. It did not survive there for a long time, according to palaeontologist Christian Kemmerer of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science. And it was also said that they have no living organism but are members of the larger group known as synapsids, which, in the form of mammals, represent living life.
Inostrancevia is a member of an animal assembly called proto-mammals, with both reptile-like and mammal-like combined features. It was about 10–13 feet long, roughly the size of a Siberian tiger, with a proportionally larger and elongated skull and blade-like teeth.
Its body had an unusual posture typical of proto-mammals, sprawling like a reptile and erect like a mammal with sprawled forelimbs and facial musculature like mammals, and it would not produce milk.
