Researchers in South Africa have found 360-million-year-old fossils of a gluttonous fish species that preyed on our recently described ancestors.

A giant fish with deadly teeth preyed on the river waters of the ancient southern supercontinent Gondwana, about 350 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the planet, a new study has found.

At up to 9 feet (2.7 m) long, this fish was the largest bony fish in Late Devonian history (383 million to 359 million years ago) and was a predator, causing researchers to call it Hyneria udlezinye, or “one of you.” .who consumes others”, in the Hesychosa language, an indigenous language widely spoken in the region of South Africa where the bones are found.

“Imagine a huge predatory fish that easily reaches 2 meters in length and looks a bit like a modern crocodile, but with a shorter face like the front of a torpedo,” said co-author Per Alberg, a professor in the Department of Organisms. Biology at Uppsala University in Sweden told Live Science. “In addition to rows of small teeth in the mouth, the largest individuals probably had large canines, which could reach 5 centimeters.”

Researchers discovered the first clues to the existence of ancient fish in 1995 when they found a set of isolated fossilized scales at an excavation site called “Waterloo Farm” near Mahanda (formerly known as Grahamstown) in South Africa. Now, in a study published in the journal PLOS One, researchers have finally put together the skeleton of a newly discovered species of ancient bony fish, the giant tristicopterid.

“Since then, we’ve had a long journey to piece together the answer as to where these scales came from,” said co-author Robert Hess, a paleontologist and research fellow at the Albany Museum and Rhodes University in South Africa.

The skeleton shows that H. udlezinye was a voracious hunter. “Swimmers are mainly located on the back of the body. This is an ecological feature of an lurking predator; it can run abruptly. Hyneria lurked in the dark shadows and waited for something to pass.” – Hess. it says, “This is what draws the others in.”

The giant fish likely preyed on four-legged creatures known as tetrapods, the ancestors of the group that gave rise to the human race. “Tristichopterids evolved into monsters that likely ate our ancestors,” Alberg said.

Previous research has identified another species of the same genus, H. lindae, in an area in Pennsylvania that was part of the supercontinent Euramerica during the Late Devonian period.

Fossils from Waterloo Farm are the first to show that Gyneria lived in Gondwana. The new study also shows that giant tristicopterids lived not only in the tropical regions of Gondwana, but also throughout the continent and even beyond the Arctic Circle.

Most of the tristicopterid fossils found today were excavated in Australia, which has distorted our understanding of the distribution of these animals. Other areas belonging to Gondwana, such as Africa and South America, have been less explored.

“Because Australia is in the tropics and all well-sampled sites from this period and Gondwana are in Australia, there was a sense that these giant tristichopterids originated along the tropical coast of Gondwana, which is now Australia.” said.

Now, researchers have found, for the first time, the remains of a giant tristicopterid in what was then the polar region. “We have a guild of giant predatory fish, and this is the only example we have from the polar regions,” Alberg said.

Tristichopterids disappeared in a mass extinction at the end of the Devonian, about 359 million years ago. They have no direct descendants today, but researchers believe that a common ancestor with our genealogy existed earlier, in the Devonian. “Late Devonian tristicopterids are our third cousins ​​rather than our direct ancestors,” Ahlberg said. Said.