Meet Jirahgorgon: The New Permian Predator Species Discovered in South Africa
- May 27
- 7 min read
New Middle Permian Gorgonopsian from South Africa Reveals the Early Origins of Large-Bodied Apex Predators
Long before the wolves, crocodiles, and lions, long before the T. rex and Spinosaurus, there was a very different kind of predator that roamed the earth. During the middle Permian, ca. 265 million years ago (Ma), on the supercontinent Pangea, one of the earliest apex predators walked the earth, the gorgonopsians.
These creatures were terrifying wolf-crocodile-like predators that would one day grow to massive sizes. However, despite their significance, their early diversification remains poorly understood, mainly due to a scarcity of remains, and when remains are recovered, they tend to be fragmentary. Not stellar conditions for understanding how, when, and why something evolved.
However, in a recent study, Dr. Zanildo Macungo and his colleagues found a fossilized gorgonopsian unlike any other. In fact, it changes what we thought we knew about early gorgonopsians, small predators that only later became the large creatures found in later periods. But perhaps that narrative is not quite right. And that was not all, the fossil had more secrets buried for nearly 265 million years. But to understand that, we first need to travel back in time and meet our gorgonopsian friends.
The Ancient Predators that Roamed the Earth
I say friends, but they probably would have bitten your hand off if you tried to stroke one. But perhaps explaining exactly what gorgonopsians were may help dissuade you from trying to give one a head scratch.
During the middle to late Permian (Guadalupian-Lopingian), therapsids, which were ancient mammal-like creatures that would one day lead to mammals, had diversified and dominated all terrestrial vertebrate faunas. Among these mammal-like creatures were gorgonopsians, who became some of the earliest specialized apex predators.
Although over 30 genera of this species are known to have once existed, each and every one of them is extinct, and the gorgonopsians have no living descendants today. In fact, the only relatively closely related group of creatures that still exists today is the mammals. And like mammals, it’s thought that gorgonopsians may have been warm-blooded.
One of the best-studied gorgonopsians was Lycaenops, meaning ‘wolf-face’. Just like a wolf, the skull of the Lycaenops was long, slender, and low. However, unlike a wolf, it also had long, slender canines, much like those of a saber-toothed cat. These fearsome teeth allowed them to stab and tear at large prey.
This creature did not amble about in search of prey; it was agile, and combined with its deadly teeth, the gorgonopsians were harrowing predators.
Among the earliest gorgonopsians described so far is a specimen from Mallorca, dated to the early Permian. However, other specimens have been found predominantly in Russia and South Africa. Weirdly far apart until you remember Pangea was one massive continent.
The oldest Russian gorgonopsians appeared during the Wuchiapingian (ca. 260–254 Ma), an epoch within the Permian, and were small to medium-sized, whereas later periods saw gorgonopsians evolve into much larger creatures. This evolution is often thought to indicate diversification in morphology and body size within this lineage.
It was once believed that a similar linear evolution in body size existed in South Africa. Small gorgonopsians came first, then medium, and eventually they evolved into large apex predators. But evolution is rarely so neat and tidy, and the discovery of a new species in 2022 in South Africa, Phorcys, complicated the picture; it was larger than its contemporaries, with the only other gorgonopsians from the same period in South Africa being the small-bodied Eriphostoma microdon.
However, the problem with a singular fossil is that, well, it’s a singular fossil; it may simply have been a fluke, a one-off evolutionary oddity. More fossils and more species are needed to confirm it wasn’t, and that’s where our fossil comes into play.
Finding the Unexpected
The lower Abrahamskraal Formation in South Africa’s Karoo Basin offers a rare window into the early and poorly understood phase of gorgonopsian evolution. During recent fieldwork on a farm called Wilgerbos (Western Cape), Julien Benoit, with the help of Michael Day, came across a fossil in a calcium-rich rock layer known locally as koffieklip. The fossil was spectacular, comprising a complete skull and jaw of a gorgonopsian, with the characteristic long, slender skull and deadly long canines.
From radiometric dating of nearby rock layers, it is thought that the site and, therefore, the fossil date to around the boundary between the Wordian (266.9 Ma) and Capitanian (264.28 Ma) periods, making this fossil one of the oldest windows into gorgonopsian diversity in southern Africa.
The specimen, with the wonderfully scientific name BP/1/8260, had broken into two pieces, both of which were extracted and then sent thousands of kilometers north to Grenoble, France, where they were scanned with a synchrotron X-ray scanner to produce highly detailed 3D images of the fossils. However, the fossil did not stay in France; it is currently housed in the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
For me, that means I would have to walk across the road from where I usually work at Wits, stand around the ESI entrance in the hopes that someone will let me in, as my key card has no access to the building, and then my sleuthing would commence, though I probably won’t get far. The only part of the building I can technically explore is the basement, as it houses the modern faunal collection. However, if the fossil is basically anywhere else in the building, my cause is a lost one, as I have no access or reason to be in any other part of the building. But at least I tried.
Meet Jirahgrogon ceto
Analysis of the remains revealed it belonged to a new species. It was named Jirahgorgon ceto. The name was derived from the surname Jirah, in honor of Dr. Sifelani Jirah, a curator who made significant contributions to the discovery and preparation of middle Permian Karoo fossils, while gorgon was a callback not only to the gorgonopsians but specifically referred to the gorgons in Greek mythology. Ceto, on the other hand, was the wife of Phorcys and the mother of the Gorgons.
What made Jirahgrogon so fascinating was its unique combination of features, some primitive, others surprisingly modern, or at least modern in terms of gorgonopsians; they were still over 265 Ma old. For example, it retains a narrower contribution of the squamosal bone than the tabular bone on the back of the skull (the occiput). This probably means little to you, but in essence, the reason this is interesting is that it is a feature shared with Russian gorgonopsians but not the other African specimens. This means the feature is likely a primitive one that was lost in all other African gorgonopsians but retained in the Russian specimen.
But far more interesting was its size. Remember how I was saying that body size in gorgonopsians was believed to have evolved linearly from small to big, and how Phorcys’s discovery in South Africa complicated the matter.
Well, it turns out Phorcys was not an evolutionary fluke, as Jirahgorgon seemed to also have been of a larger size. One key feature that indicated this was the vertically orientated occiput: basically, the back of the skull stood almost perfectly vertically, a feature seen in large, heavy-bodied gorgonopsians that are thought to have evolved much later in the Permian.
Why does that matter? Because until now, the scientific consensus was that large, robustly built gorgonopsians were exclusively a later Permian phenomenon. They weren’t supposed to show up so early, and yet here were not one but two gorgonopsians, of separate species, both of which were larger than their contemporaries, indicating it was not just some evolutionary oddity. Crucially, the study also found that Jirahgorgons and Phorcys were close relatives. Together they form a previously unrecognised family, Phorcyidae.
It seems gorgonopsian body-size evolution was not linear, but may have repeated in bursts across different lineages, with body size heavily dependent on species relatedness. Basically, large body size in gorgonopsians was not a simple, slow evolution with each subsequent species bigger than the last, but rather it evolved repeatedly and independently in both early and later species.
Interestingly, another characteristic of Jirahgorgon was its rubidgeine-like cranial proportions. Rubidgeines were large gorgonopsians that appeared in the late Permian. Their skulls had a distinctive combination of features, typically attributed to later Permian large-bodied gorgonopsians. And yet they appear here in Jirahgorgon millions of years earlier, indicating the evolution of such features began significantly earlier than previously thought.
Further research in the same region is currently being conducted; after all, it is unlikely Jirahgorgon was the only one of its kind. Perhaps further fieldwork will recover other specimens and highlight even more about these unique creatures.
Jirahgorgon offers a unique and rare insight into the early evolution and diversification of gorgonopsians. Despite what was previously believed, some features, such as large body size and unique cranial morphology, evolved millions of years earlier.
These wolf-crocodile-like creatures were heavyweight apex predators much earlier than previously believed, which, combined with their agility, makes them that much more fascinating and terrifying in my opinion. Depending on your point of view, they sadly, or fortunately, went extinct during the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as the “Great Dying”. As specialists rather than generalists, they were unable to adapt to such drastic, rapid changes. I guess no matter how large, ferocious, or successful, if the food chain around you collapses, the habitat you know is lost, and the world is suddenly much hotter than it was before, even the best predator may go extinct.
Are you familiar with gorgonopsians, and are you surprised that larger body size may have evolved earlier and sporadically across various lineages, rather than in a linear fashion as previously believed? Originally Posted on Medium
References
Introduction to the Gorgonopsia. (n.d.). Ucmp.berkeley.edu. https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/synapsids/gorgonopsia.html
Macungo, Z., Araújo, R., Rubidge, B. S., Day, M. O., Dollman, K. N., & Benoit, J. (2026). Evolutionary radiation of large-bodied gorgonopsians from the lower Abrahamskraal formation of South Africa. The Anatomical Record, 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70181
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