n that Southern Africa and Southern America was once a single
landmass.
A new fossil appears to have been discovered in Brazil that has
intimate ties to a species which was identified at Williston in the
Northern Cape in 1999.
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The Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontology at the University of
the Witwatersrand reported the find, adding that ex Wits student, Dr
Juan Cisneros, found and designated the fossil.
“The new find, together with the specimen from Williston, is the
oldest evidence of similar faunas of land-living vertebrates between the
African and South American continents, thus demonstrating that more
than 260 million years ago, these animals were moving between what are
today the continents of Africa and South America,” Wits said in a
statement.
The information indicates that there was geographical contact between
fauna on the now separate landmasses.
The study was co-authored by Professor Bruce Rubidge, director of the
Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research (BPI) at Wits and
Dr Fernando Abdala, also from the BPI, and publicized in the journal
Science on Friday.
The species from South Africa and Brazil, South America form a modern
group, in times past not acknowledged, that survived in Brazil and
South Africa (in Gondwana) no less than 260 million years in the past.
“The new Brazilian species presents some unexpected dental features:
it is the oldest known herbivore that shows sabre canines. This
indicates that they used this large tooth for display against predators
and also intraspecifically.
“The new species also shows a battery of teeth following the canine
that are placed in bones from the palate, ectopterygoid and pterygoid,
and show evidence of dental occlusion with teeth from the lower jaw,”
Abdala said.
“This provides additional evidence of geographic contact between
terrestrial faunas from these now separate continents; but, more
importantly, it also establishes a temporal bridge, in other words, the
faunas having these animals represent nearly similar ages on both
continents,” said Rubidge