SCIENTISTS have identified a 307-million-year-old fossil of one of the earliest known land vertebrates to evolve the ability to eat plants.
The discovery, described in a paper published in the journal
Nature Ecology & Evolution, sheds light on a period when early land animals fed mainly on other animals after life first began in the oceans and later moved onto land.
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Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-lead author of the study, said it was one of the oldest known four-legged animals to eat its veggies and showed that experimentation with herbivory dated back to the earliest terrestrial tetrapods.
Co-lead author Zifang Xiong, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, said a detailed 3D reconstruction of the fossil skull revealed specialised teeth linked to plant eating, and the researchers named the species Tyrannoroter heberti in honour of its discoverer, Brian Hebert.
Only the skull has been recovered, but comparisons with related species suggest the stocky four-legged animal, about a foot long and roughly the size and shape of an American football, lived near the end of the Carboniferous Period on what is now Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where its decline may offer insight into how plant-eating animals respond to rapid climate change.
