World's oldest mammalian ancestor discovered on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca

Apparently, Mallorca is not only a favorite tourist destination for snowbirds!

"An international research team ... have described a fossil animal that lived between 270 and 280 million years ago in present-day Mallorca. ...

The discovery is exceptional, not only because of the number of fossil remains found, but also because it is the oldest known gorgonopsian on the planet, the lineage of saber-toothed predators that would eventually give rise to mammals. ...

"The large number of bone remains is surprising. We have found everything from fragments of skull, vertebrae, and ribs to a very well-preserved femur. In fact, when we started this excavation, we never thought we would find so many remains of an animal of this type in Mallorca," ..."

From the abstract:

"Therapsids were a dominant component of middle–late Permian terrestrial ecosystems worldwide, eventually giving rise to mammals during the early Mesozoic. However, little is currently known about the time and place of origin of Therapsida. Here we describe a definitive therapsid from the lower–?middle Permian palaeotropics, a partial skeleton of a gorgonopsian from the island of Mallorca, western Mediterranean.

This specimen represents, to our knowledge, the oldest gorgonopsian record worldwide, and possibly the oldest known therapsid. Using emerging relaxed clock models, we provide a quantitative timeline for the origin and early diversification of therapsids, indicating a long ghost lineage leading to the evolutionary radiation of all major therapsid clades within less than 10 Myr, in the aftermath of Olson’s Extinction. Our findings place this unambiguous early therapsid in an ancient summer wet biome of equatorial Pangaea, thus suggesting that the group originated in tropical rather than temperate regions."

World's oldest mammalian ancestor discovered in Mallorca

Early–middle Permian Mediterranean gorgonopsian suggests an equatorial origin of therapsids (open access)

Fig. 1: Geological context of the gorgonopsian from Mallorca.

Fig. 3: Most relevant elements of DA21/17-01-01 and silhouette showing their positions