Page 38 - Karoo News Today

This ancestor of mammals briefly thrived amid a massive extinction event, hinting at how carnivores may respond to climate change today

SAWS warned that heavy downpours may lead to flooding of roads, low lying bridges and formal and informal settlements and disruption to essential services such as electricity and water.

New findings expand the range of livable regions in interior South Africa nearly 200,000 years ago, during an ice age called MIS6.

Adrian Robertson, now chair of the Rooiberg Breede River Conservancy, admits that there have been several excursions and a few missteps along the way.

The way that carnivores went extinct first has parallels with the present day, according to scientists

A tiger-sized saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia has previously only been found in Russia. But scientists have discovered its fossils in South Africa, suggesting that it migrated 7,000 miles across the supercontinent Pangaea during the world's worst mass extinction 252 million years ago. Heading to South Africa allowed it to fill a gap in a faraway ecosystem that had lost its top predators.

Cape Nature and the SA National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) shone a spotlight on the catastrophic rise in illegal harvesting of plants across the Succulent Karoo region.

As an extinction crisis wiped out species at the end of the Permian Period, a predatory species emerged that dominated Southern Africa’s domain.

The extinction event wiped out 80 to 90 percent of Earth’s species and completely changed the biosphere.

The researchers see parallels between the Permian crisis and today's human-induced climate change.