{"id":277980,"date":"2026-02-11T03:11:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T03:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/277980\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T03:11:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T03:11:07","slug":"307-million-year-old-fossil-of-plant-eating-land-vertebrate-found-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/277980\/","title":{"rendered":"307-Million-Year-Old Fossil of Plant-Eating Land Vertebrate Found in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tyrannoroter heberti, a new species of pantylid \u2018microsaur\u2019 from the Carboniferous period, shows that some of Earth\u2019s earliest land vertebrates had already evolved complex teeth for grinding plants, suggesting terrestrial herbivory emerged rapidly after animals moved onto land.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cdn.sci.news\/images\/enlarge13\/image_14547e-Tyrannoroter-heberti.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-108442\" class=\"wp-image-108442 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/image_14547-Tyrannoroter-heberti.jpg\" alt=\"Life reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti. Image credit: Hannah Fredd.\" width=\"580\" height=\"400\"  \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-108442\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Life reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti. Image credit: Hannah Fredd.<\/p>\n<p>Tyrannoroter heberti lived in what is now Canada during the Carboniferous period, some 307 million years ago.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is one of the oldest known four-legged animals to eat its veggies,\u201d said Dr. Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt shows that experimentation with herbivory goes all the way back to the earliest terrestrial tetrapods \u2014 the ancient relatives of all land vertebrates, including us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe specimen is the first of its group to receive a detailed 3D reconstruction, which allowed us to look inside its skull and reveal its specialized teeth, helping us to trace the origin of terrestrial herbivory,\u201d added Zifang Xiong, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto.<\/p>\n<p>The fossilized skull of Tyrannoroter heberti was discovered on <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cape_Breton_Island\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Cape Breton Island<\/a>, Nova Scotia.<\/p>\n<p>Based on the size of its head and the more complete skeletons of its relatives, the animal measured about 30 cm (one foot) in length.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was roughly the size and shape of an American football,\u201d Dr. Mann said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy modern standards, that\u2019s not terribly large, but it was one of the largest land-dwelling animals of its time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTyrannoroter heberti probably looked a little like a lizard, but it lived before the ancestors of reptiles and mammals split off from each other, so it technically wasn\u2019t a reptile.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tyrannoroter heberti belongs to an extinct family of small amphibian-like tetrapods called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pantylidae\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Pantylidae<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe pantylids are a fairly early chapter in the story of vertebrate animals living on land,\u201d Dr. Mann said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen lobe-finned fish first evolved limbs that let them scoot onto the land, they still depended largely on their watery homes. \u201c<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe pantylids are from the second phase of terrestriality, when animals became permanently adapted to life on dry land.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019re what scientists call stem amniotes \u2014 animals closely related to the group of tetrapods that evolved eggs that could stay dry outside of water.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn later years, these stem amniotes would split into reptiles and the early ancestors of mammals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTyrannoroter heberti is of great interest because it was long thought that herbivory was restricted to amniotes,\u201d said Dr. Hans Sues, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is a stem amniote but has a specialized dentition that could be used for processing plant fodder.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tyrannoroter heberti probably also ate smaller animals, including insects, in addition to vegetation, and the insect exoskeletons in early tetrapods\u2019 diets may have paved the way for stem amniotes like Tyrannoroter heberti to be able to crush and process tough plant materials.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s more, digesting the bodies of plant-eating insects may have given early tetrapods the gut flora and microbes they would need to process plants.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the end of the Carboniferous, the rainforest ecosystems collapsed, and we had a period of global warming,\u201d Dr. Mann said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe lineage of animals that Tyrannoroter heberti belongs to didn\u2019t do very well.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis could be a data point in the bigger picture of what happens to plant-eating animals when climate change rapidly alters their ecosystems and the plants that can grow there.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41559-025-02929-8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">paper<\/a> describing the discovery of Tyrannoroter heberti was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>A. Mann et al. Carboniferous recumbirostran elucidates the origins of terrestrial herbivory. Nat Ecol Evol, published online February 10, 2026; doi: 10.1038\/s41559-025-02929-8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tyrannoroter heberti, a new species of pantylid \u2018microsaur\u2019 from the Carboniferous period, shows that some of Earth\u2019s earliest&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[156191,275,156192,30867,25078,156193,156194,111,139,64,282,69,156195,147,6110,156196,156197,156198,137087],"class_list":{"0":"post-277980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-amniota","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-cape-breton-island","11":"tag-carboniferous","12":"tag-fossil","13":"tag-herbivory","14":"tag-microsaur","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-north-america","18":"tag-nova-scotia","19":"tag-nz","20":"tag-pantylidae","21":"tag-science","22":"tag-teeth","23":"tag-tetrapod","24":"tag-tyrannoroter","25":"tag-tyrannoroter-heberti","26":"tag-vertebrate"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}