SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — The discovery of a new species of extinct saber-tooth is helping paleontologists fill in the gaps and providing new details about an ancient animal that has long-captured the imaginations of visitors to natural history museums.
Dubbed "Pangurban", it is the second new saber-tooth species identified among San Diego fossils in the last year, after the discovery of "Diegoaelurus", or San Diego's Cat, last year.
“Peeling back some of what we see in San Diego to understand how we got here, that was really fascinating to me. And, course, the awesome cute and charismatic and/or scary meat-eaters are a really fun part of that," said Dr. Ashley Poust, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum who helped lead a team of scientists from around the world on the discovery.
The fossil now identified as Pangurban was found on a construction site in Scripps Ranch in 1997. The specimen was carefully maintained, but went un-researched until the Covid-19 pandemic.
During lockdowns, Poust was unable to go out into the field or do research at other institutions. So he turned his attention to the San Diego Natural History museum's own catalogue of unidentified specimens.
“Even though this seems like a small piece, it’s a very important piece. In mammals, teeth are like our identify chip," Poust says. The fragment was enough to identify it as a saber-tooth, but had enough key differences to indicate it as its own species. Pangurban likely roamed San Diego around 38 million years ago, tens of millions of years before the most well-known saber-tooth, the Smilodon, which is popularly called by the misnomer "saber-tooth tiger".
The San Diego of the Pangurban was very different than today's world, and not just because of the presence of modern man.
Back then, the San Andreas fault had yet to begun its dramatic impact on the West Coast. Because of that, there was no Sea of Cortez, meaning Baja California was still attached to the mainland of what is now Mexico. The entire area was in a period of transition from rainforest to lush and fertile wetlands, plains, and forests, as opposed to the desert climate we know today.
Poust says studying the rise and extinction of saber-tooths such as Pangurban and Diegoaelurus could help provide answers about how life on Earth handles significant changes in climate.
“It’s important for us to understand how animals change or evolve during periods where the climate or the land surface is changing rapidly.”
He expects many more discoveries in coming years, as new technology makes it more possible to identify fossils and glean new information from them.
Poust also says new specimens are being found frequently, saying several have already been found during the currently-underway construction on a new border crossing in Otay Mesa.
