meet Tyranno Rotor Hebertia newly described species that was one of the largest and most feared land animals of its time, at least if you were a fern. Born 307 million years ago, this strange quadruped was one of the earliest known land creatures to experiment with a herbivorous diet.

By the time the first vertebrates were pulled out of water about 370 million years ago, the plant was already alive They existed quite peacefully on land for over 100 million years.

Fortunately for the plants, these creatures seemed content to feed on each other for many years, but it was only a matter of time before something evolved a way to take advantage of this rich new food source.

A CT scan of the skull revealed the following: tyranno rotor He was one of the first to discover it. Its teeth and jaws were well adapted to a primarily plant-based diet.

“This is one of the oldest quadrupeds known to eat vegetables.” say said Arjan Mann, an evolutionary biologist at Chicago’s Field Museum and co-lead author of the study explaining the discovery.

“This shows that herbivore experimentation dates back to the earliest land animals. tetrapod – An ancient relative of all land vertebrates, including us. ”

Despite its scary name, tyranno rotor It was probably only about 25 centimeters (10 inches) long. It is thought to belong to a group of animals called pantylids, which are related to the last common ancestor of reptiles and mammals.

“Pantilids are from the second stage of terrestrial life, when animals became permanently adapted to life on land.” say Man.

discovered by paleontologists tyranno rotorskull inside a fossilized tree stump in Nova Scotia, Canada. Researchers in the new study performed high-resolution research. Micro CT scan on the skull to find out what story those teeth tell.

With the familiar teeth lined up along the jawbone, tyranno rotor The roof of the mouth and lower jaw had a series of bony plates called the dental battery. As seen in many places, later herbivoresinclude dinosaurthese plates are thought to have rubbed against each other to grind up hard plant matter.

“We were most excited to scan and see what was hidden inside this animal’s mouth, which is packed with additional teeth for crushing and grinding food such as plants.” say Hilary Maddin is a paleontologist at Carleton University in Canada and the study’s senior author.

tyranno rotor Researchers say it may have been a vegetarian, but it probably wasn’t. It probably would not have refused insects or insect food. arthropod If you have the chance.

In fact, our herbivorous diet may be due to our ancestors eating herbivores in the first place. Dental batteries may have evolved as a way to shatter tough exoskeletons before industrious animals discovered they could also be used on unsuspecting plants.

And since the insects themselves ate plants, eating them may have primed the quadruped’s gut with the right microbiome to digest cellulose.

Related: One of the first animals to venture onto land quickly returned to water

Interestingly, after researchers identified suspicious herbivorous tooth structures; tyranno rotorthey reexamined other pantylid specimens and found similar features. Some of them are 318 million years old.

“These findings, among other recent studies, provide direct evidence to revise the chronology of the origin of herbivory, revealing that different herbivorous forms emerged rapidly after the terrestrialization of tetrapods,” the researchers said. write.

The study was published in the journal systematic paleontology.