We can hear thanks to our middle ear bones, something that began with holes in the sides of therapsid skulls. Among these ancient animals was a group of saber-toothed gorgonopsians, the oldest of which were thought to have lived 265 million years ago. But don’t you know it, we just found one that is wayyy older.

A newly discovered fossil dates back to between 270-280 million years ago, pushing back their existence by around 15 million years. “It is most likely the oldest gorgonopsian on the planet,” senior author Josep Fortuny of the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) in Spain said in a statement. 

The specimen was retrieved from Mallorca, which is now an island in the Mediterranean Sea, but when this thing lived over 270 million years ago, the island was part of the supercontinent of Pangea. It hasn’t yet been named, but it’s been confirmed as a member of the gorgonopsians, making it the oldest saber-toothed predator known to science.

Despite its incredible age, the find presented a remarkable amount of fossil material to work with.

“The large number of bone remains is surprising,” said Rafel Matamales, curator of the Museu Balear de Ciències Naturals. “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.”

Gorgonopsians are famously saber-toothed and this latest specimen is no different, leading the team who discovered it to believe it was also a top predator. As for what it looked like? Imagine a dog that’s had a rough year.

“If you saw this animal walking down the street, it would look a little bit like a medium-sized dog, maybe about the size of a husky, but it wouldn’t be quite right,” said Ken Angielczyk, the Field Museum’s MacArthur Curator of Paleomammalogy and a co-author of the paper. “It didn’t have any fur, and it wouldn’t have had dog-like ears, but it’s the oldest animal scientists have ever found with long, blade-like canine teeth.”

It’s a remarkable discovery for fans of saber-toothed predators, but it also reveals a lot about the evolution of therapsids and, in turn, the emergence of mammals. We’re not their direct descendants, but they were related to species that were our direct ancestors, so finds like this help to build a clearer picture of where we came from.

“Before the time of dinosaurs, there was an age of ancient mammal relatives,” added Angielczyk. “Most of those ancient mammal relatives looked really different from what we think of mammals looking like today, but they were really diverse and played lots of different ecological roles. The discovery of this new fossil is another piece of the puzzle for how mammals evolved.”

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.