“It has these huge tusks, the entire front of its mouth is made up of giant teeth,” study co-leader Jason D. Pardo of the Negaunee Integrative Research Center at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago said in a statement.
The research team, led by Claudia A. Marsicano of the University of Buenos Aires and Pardo, described it as a “new, exceptionally large aquatic tetrapod” that “provides critical information about tetrapods that inhabited high latitudes of Gondwana,” referring to the polar regions of the prehistoric southern landmass.
Anthony Romilio, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Laboratory in Australia who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email that it was a “fascinating discovery” that “challenges the belief that early land animals (tetrapods) were found primarily near the equator in coal-bearing swamps.”
“Gaiasia occurred much further south than their close relatives that lived in what is now North America and Europe,” he said, adding that the discovery “in the colder, high-latitude southern regions of the ancient supercontinent indicates that early tetrapods were more widespread and adaptable to different climates than previously thought.”
Christian A. Sidor, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Washington who was also not part of the research team, wrote in Nature that the discovery helped “fill a gap in the fossil record” because it was found in “a place and time that no paleontologist would have expected.”
The creature lived about 280 million years ago, during the early Permian period, a time when there was a single continent, Pangaea — and about 40 million years before the first dinosaurs. This was the time of other predators, such as Dimetrodona carnivore with a sail on its back, and Helicopriona shark-like fish with spirally arranged teeth.
Gaiasia jennyae was an “archaic” species even in its time, Pardo said, surviving some 40 million years after most of its relatives had died out, at the end of an ice age in which new animal lineages were forming.
The name was given in honor of the Gai-As Formation in Namibia, where the fossils were found, and in honor of paleontologist Jenny Clack, who died in 2020. Scientists gathered information about the creature from four specimens.
