Artistic reconstruction of Pampaphoneus biccai. Credit: Original artwork by Márcio Castro
Phys.org has a story about a new Permian fossil from Brazil. Pampaphoneus biccai lived about 265 million years ago, during the Permian Period, around what is now São Gabriel in Southern Brazil. It was a dinocephalian, which are related to early mammals. This specimen is the first found in South America. Previously, they were only known from deposits in South Africa and Russia. The details can be found in a paper published in the journal Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society,
"The fossil was found in middle Permian rocks, in an area where bones are not so common, but always hold pleasant surprises," said lead author Mateus A. Costa Santos, a graduate student in the Paleontology Laboratory at the Federal University of Pampa (UNIPAMPA). "Finding a new Pampaphoneus skull after so long was extremely important for increasing our knowledge about the animal, which was previously difficult to differentiate from its Russian relatives."
Paleontologists from UNIPAMPA and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) collected the fossil over one month of daily, backbreaking fieldwork.
Due to the pandemic, it took an additional three years for the fossil to be cleaned and thoroughly studied. Co-author Professor Stephanie E. Pierce, in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and Mammalogy in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, participated in the study of the animal as part of her current work with senior author and head of lab Professor Felipe Pinheiro, UNIPAMPA, on the Permo-Triassic fossil record of Brazil.
