Manhattan Taxi To Woodbury

Herbivore found a rare primitive sabretooth

260 million years ago, mammals and dinosaurs had not yet signed in terrestrial ecosystems. The Pangea macrocontinente beings scurrying now fall under exotic names taxonomic categories and which only obvious common feature: four legs. Those primitive tetrapods are the object of study of Salvadoran paleontologist Juan Carlos Cisneros, head of the finding of the last sample of that paleofauna whose character is said in the name of the new species: Tiarajudens eccentricus.

The Tiarajudens, the size of a large dog, lived at the end of the Paleozoic before the Permian extinction, the largest that has ravaged the planet and that would be the festival that adorned the Mesozoic dinosaurs. Cisneros writes in Science, at that time had already developed a large pantry herbivores that fed a small cast of predators.

Among the former had the Tiarajudens whose classification places him as a synapsids (something that is not a reptile) therapsids group (synapsids no mammals), and in particular, as a anomodonto, a lineage of herbivores fibrous herbs chewed land of Gondwana, the southern base of Pangea that later would become independent as a supercontinent. The ground she walked on Tiarajudens now part of Brazil. There Cisneros, from the Federal University of Piauí, tracks reservoirs of the Permian and Triassic in search of fossils. Aberrant


But even for his clan, the Tiarajudens is the weirdo. Writes in a commentary to the study's expert Humboldtde University Berlin Jörg Fröbisch within the anomodontos, which showed a "progressive development of mammalian traits," the Tiarajudens is "absurd" for its "unique and specialized dentition." Although some of his relatives shared vegetarian dental occlusion (the ability to fit the pieces of a jaw with the other to grind fiber), the palate Tiarajudens was studded with teeth, something unique in your neighborhood. It is the icing

: 12 cm two canines protruding from his mouth. Cisneros explains that this is not the style tusks of elephants and certain relatives of Tiarajudens, with continued growth and unglazed circular section, but true saber-toothed laterally compressed and glazed. What would such weapons a vegetarian? "The large canines of saber are unexpected in a herbivore," writes Cisneros. Modeled current deer, the scientist speculates that maybe used "to manipulate the food before processing, deter predators or display and combat within their species. "

Source: publico.es