The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Saber-Toothed Predator.
Scientists have discovered that a saber-toothed beast called Inostrancevia briefly dominated southern ecosystems after migrating across the supercontinent Pangaea from what is now Russia to South Africa. Inostrancevia belonged to an ancient group of mammals called the gorgonopsians that went extinct during the “Great Dying,” also known as the Permian-Triassic or late-Permian mass extinction. The discovery suggests that top predators were "canaries in the coal mine" for the mass extinction and sheds light on the great die-out that’s unfolding today.