It is rare to find fossils in the area in Tanzania where Ohio University paleontologists were studying, and it's even rarer to find a fossil of a meat-eater.
But in early October, paleontologists published a paper about their discovery of Pakakali rukwaensis, the first discovered meat-eating mammal from an important period in African geological history.
“Finding a carnivore in this site that already doesn’t have a lot of fossils is just a really amazing and exciting discovery,” Matthew Borths, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in biology who contributed to the discovery, said.
Borths worked with Nancy Stevens, an OU professor and paleontologist, and her lab to discover the fossil and research its larger implications.
The discovery of a predator tells a lot about an ecosystem, Stevens said. She has worked in the Rukwa Rift Basin in southwest Tanzania since 2002 and has uncovered fossils from several different time intervals, but Pakakali was a rare discovery.
Borths said the fossil they found is about 25 million years old, right in a blind spot for fossil records.
“It’s from this really crucial time period where we really didn’t have any information,” he said. “There was this kind of chunk in fossil records that we just didn’t have anything in Africa.”
The time period Pakakali is from is crucial because African geography was changing greatly and rapidly.
It was during this time that the ecosystem in Africa changed. The formation of the East African Rift System dramatically changed the climate and landscape of the region. Hyaenodonts, the lineage of meat-eating mammals Pakakali belongs to, went from dominating the continent to becoming extinct, and modern carnivores rose to prominence.
“Extinction dynamics are part of the modern world as well,” Stevens said.
Studying Pakakali can give insight about the major ecological changes that occurred in its time, and those changes can relate to current changes in our world’s ecology.
The lab is “very interested“ in making connections between modern conservation and extinction efforts and the systems that played out in the past, Borths said.
“The experiment has been run,” he said. “The world has changed many times over, and we can use some of that information from the past to then understand what we’re doing to modern systems today.”
