PROTOMAMMALS: BEFORE DINOSAURS, THESE CREATURES RULED EARTH

RALEIGH, N.C.—You wander through a museum, glance at some dinosaur bones and think that one skull looks a little funny. You’ve discovered a new species.

Sure, that sounds unlikely. But that’s what happened when a North Carolina paleontologist discovered two new species of protomammals, mammal-like reptiles that existed millions of years before dinosaurs, while visiting a small Russian museum.

Almost an entire skull of the saber-toothed Gorynychus sat unidentified in the Vyatka Paleontological Museum in Kirov, Russia, until Christian Kammerer, research curator of paleontology at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, stopped by for a short visit.

Kammerer previously had discovered 15 new species before finding Gorynychus and Nochnitsa, the other species he identified at Vyatka.

“I would guarantee you there are thousands of undescribed species in museum collections,” Kammerer said. “Most new species are found in museum collections for the sole reason that there are literally millions of species on earth today and many more in the fossil record. When you’re going out and collecting specimens, you won’t know those things. The people in the museum knew they were protomammals but they didn’t know they were new species.”

Protomammals lived during the Permian period, which ended around 252 million years ago when a massive event killed off 90 percent of species on Earth, Kammerer said.

The new fossils prove that a smaller mid-Permian event switched up the global pecking order.

Before the mid-Permian mass extinction, Gorynychus loomed larger than Nochnitsa as the top predator. But fossils from after the extinction show that animals like Gorynychus were smaller and ate insects, while animals like Nochnitsa ruled the roost as tiger-sized saber-toothed carnivores. It’s as if bears and weasels traded sizes, Kammerer said.

“In the age before the dinosaurs, when protomammals were the dominant life on land, you had two different groups that switch off on which is the top predator,” Kammerer said. “You have wolf- to lion-sized saber tooth animals wiped out by a mass extinction, and (the Nochnitsa-like animals) take over. But (Gorynychus-like animals) aren’t wiped out altogether in this extinction, and they take over and become a small insect eating predator, not large carnivores anymore.”

It’s hard to find mid-Permian fossils. Erosion, earthquakes and volcanoes have destroyed most Permian rock. Grass, forests and water cover up much of the remaining intact rock layers.

Almost all mid-Permian fossils come from South Africa, where extremely hard volcanic rock protects lower layers from erosion. Paleontologists can reach the fossils because wind has swept off millions of years of layers above the volcanic rock, said Kirstin Brink, postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.