You know, usually when we sit down to do a deep
dive into a new scientific discovery, we're talking
about something found last week or maybe a fossil
dug up last summer that just got prepped in the
lab. Right. Yeah. Fresh dirt, fresh headlines.
That is the standard rhythm of the news cycle.
But today is, oh, today's weird. Yeah. Different.
We are looking at a creature that has been sitting
in a museum drawer since the Truman administration.
It has. I mean, it's been studied and argued
over and even written about in PhD theses for
decades. But this is the wild part to me. It
didn't technically exist in the eyes of science
until early 2026. It's essentially a ghost story.
But instead of a haunted house, it's a haunted
peer review process. Exactly. So today we're
doing a deep dive into Ninjalila. This is a predator
from the late Permian period, so way before the
dinosaurs. We're talking about 255 million years
ago. Right. The monsters before the dinosaurs,
as they say. Yeah. And the sources today are
just fascinating because they aren't just giving
us a biology lesson. They're giving us a front
row seat. to the actual bureaucracy of naming
nature. Which I know sounds dry, but when you
realize that a predator the size of a wolf can
just vanish from history because of a paperwork
technicality. It changes things. It really changes
how you look at museums. It changes how you think
about what we actually know versus what is just
sitting on a shelf waiting to be known. It totally
does. So here is our mission for this deep dive.
We need to reconstruct this animal. what it looked
like, how it hunted in this incredibly dangerous
East African ecosystem. Yeah. But we also need
to solve the mystery of why it took 76 years
to get an ID card. It is a classic case of the
naked name. The gnome and nudum. I love that
term so much. And we are absolutely going to
get into that. But first, let's just ground ourselves.
Sure. We are in East Africa in modern -day Tanzania,
late Permian. Yeah. What does the world actually
look like? Because whenever I think of pre -dinosaur
times, I just picture... A lot of brown mud.
Yeah, a barren wasteland. But it's actually surprisingly
lush. You have to picture the UCLA formation.
This isn't a desert at all. It's a massive alluvial
plain. You've got these meandering streams, a
really high water table, and it is just absolutely
teeming with life. It's green, it's wet, and
it's humid. And when we say life, we aren't talking
T -Rex. We aren't talking raptors. We are talking
about gorgon options. The gorgon faces. These
are the dominant predators of the era. They are
synapsids, which makes them stem mammals. Our
very distant cousins, basically. Exactly. If
you go back far enough, you and I share a family
reunion with these things. But they look like
literal nightmares. They really, really do. Like
a mix of a dog, a lizard, and a bear trap. That's
a great way to put it. So looking at the anatomical
description in the 2026 paper by Gebauer and
Mason Jalila, isn't the biggest monster on the
block, is it? No, it's mid -range, based on the
skull, which is about 18 centimeters long. So
roughly 7 inches. Right. You're looking at an
animal maybe the size of a very large dog or
a small wolf. Think of a border collie or a small
German shepherd. But built differently, right?
Oh yeah, much lower to the ground and heavily
muscled. Very compact. Now the face is what really
stood out to me in the notes. The authors keep
using this word pinched to describe the snout.
That is the key diagnostic feature of Nunjalila.
In most Gorgon options, the snout is this big,
boxy, battering ram of a face. Because they needed
that heavy skull to support their massive bites.
Right. They were bone crushers. But Nunjalila
has this very elegant, strange constriction in
the snout. I was trying to visualize this from
the descriptions. The nasal bones start broad
on top like a normal animal, but then they narrow
down significantly right in the middle. Yeah,
and there's this specific bone near the nostril
called the septum axilla. In Ninjalila, that
bone actually bulges out, but then immediately
behind it, the face hollows out rapidly. So if
you look at it from above... The snout literally
looks like someone pinched it between their thumb
and forefinger. Wow. It gives it a very distinct,
almost delicate look compared to the brutes it
lived with. And the tip of the snout isn't blunt,
is it? No, and that's another big identifier.
It ends in a sharp upturned point right above
the nostrils. It's a very specific straight profile.
It's not blunt. It's extremely precise. Which
naturally brings us to the teeth. You really
can't talk about these guys without talking about
the dental equipment. The papers confirm it has
the classic saber teeth, right? Oh, absolutely.
Huge blade -like canines. That is the trademark
of the Gorgonopsidae family. If you don't have
the sabers, you aren't in the club. Pretty much.
But the rest of the mouth is surprisingly sparse.
That is exactly what I noticed. The incisors,
the front teeth, they're really small. There
are five of them per side. Yeah. But they're
tiny compared to its cousins. Yeah. And behind
the fangs. Almost nothing, right? Almost nothing.
Only four or five very small post canine teeth.
So you have these massive daggers, but then tiny
little front teeth. And barely anything in the
back to actually chew with. And there's a weird
shape to the jaw, too. The sources describe a
convex curve to the upper jawbone, the maxilla.
Convex meaning it curves outward. Right. It's
shaped like the rocker on a rocking chair. Okay,
let's unpack this. Why would an animal evolve
a mouth like that? Well, when you combine that
rocking chair jawline with this distinct groove
running above the back teeth, you get a picture
of a highly specialized eater. So it wasn't just
crunching bone indiscriminately like a hyena.
No, it was slicing. It was a precision instrument.
It likely used those saber teeth to deliver a
killing slash. And then that specific jaw shape
helped it strip meat off the carcass efficiently.
So less of a bone crusher and much more of a
meat slicer. Exactly. A very clean eater. And
a highly sensory one, too. I was really surprised
by the size of the eyes. The sources emphasize
that the orbits are huge. And they face out to
the sides. Which gives it a really wide field
of vision. Right. But the thing I always love
about Permian creatures, and I feel like we just
don't talk about this enough, is the third eye.
The parietal foramen. It is my favorite party
fact about prehistory. Ninja Leela has a big
one. It's sitting on a raised boss of bone right
on top of the skull at the back. Now, for the
listener who maybe hasn't brushed up on basal
synapsid anatomy lately, this isn't for seeing
images right. It's not looking up at the sky
watching for birds. Well, there were no birds
yet to watch. Good point. But no, it's not an
eyeball in the traditional sense. It is a photosensory
organ. It tracks light levels. It connects directly
to the pineal gland inside the brain to regulate
things like circadian rhythms, body temperature,
and maybe even breeding cycles. Like a built
-in biological clock right on top of its head.
Precisely. It is a primitive feature that mammals
eventually lost as we evolved better internal
thermoregulation in different senses. But yinjalila
had a prominent one. Which suggests that managing
body heat and knowing the exact time of day was
absolutely crucial for its survival. Without
a doubt. So we have this dog -sized predator
with a pinched pointy nose, giant fangs, huge
eyes, and a light sensor on top of its head.
It sounds distinct enough that you'd think scientists
would spot it immediately and just say, hey,
that's new. You would think so, and they sort
of did. But spotting it and naming it are two
very, very different things in science. And this
leads us to the detective story. This creature
was dug up in the Ruhuhu Basin way back in the
mid -20th century. The excavations were in the
1930s and it was described in 1950. So why did
it take until early 2026, the year we are in
right now, to get a real official name? It is
a comedy of errors. It really is. It starts in
1950 with the famous German paleontologist Friedrich
von Hume. And he's a huge deal, right? Oh, he's
a legend in paleontology. He literally wrote
the book on a lot of this stuff. But he got this
one wrong. He looked at the fossil and said,
this looks like Dixia. Which was another Gorgonopsian
genus that had already been named. Right. He
thought it was a second species of that genus.
So he called it Dixia Nasuta. Nasuta referring
to that big pinch nose we just talked about.
Okay. So it has a name. 1950. Dixia Nasuta. Problem
solved, right? Problem solved until 1970. That
is when Denise Siganya Russell enters the chat.
She is a French paleontologist who essentially
did the ultimate spring cleaning of the entire
Gorgonopsian family tree. She went through all
the old collections. All of them. And she finds
a major problem with Dixaea. Let me guess, the
original wasn't what they thought it was. Exactly.
She realizes the original Dixaea, the type specimen,
is actually invalid. It's just a synonym for
another animal called Alloranathus. Oh, wow.
So she deletes the genus Dixaea. It's gone. Poof.
So our friend Nasuda is suddenly homeless. The
genus name it was attached to doesn't exist anymore.
It's like having a ticket for a train that's
been permanently canceled. That's a perfect analogy.
It is an orphan. Scania Russell looks at this
pinch -nosed skull and says, well, it's not an
Elerognathus. Maybe it's related to Arctognathus.
But she isn't sure? No, because the skull roof
was damaged. She couldn't see all the features
perfectly. So she just writes it down in her
revision as Arctonathus question mark Nasuta.
With an actual question mark. With a literal
question mark in the scientific text. The question
mark of doom. It really was. It sits in that
limo for 30 years. Just a question mark in a
museum drawer. Scientists knew it was there.
They knew it was weird, but nobody officially
touched it. Until Eva Gebauer comes along in
2007. I was reading through the notes. on her
PhD thesis, and she seems to be the one who finally
cracked it. She did. She did all the hard work.
She reexamined the skulls. She compared them
to everything else in the African and Russian
clays, and she said, no, this isn't Arctognathus.
It's its own thing. Completely unique. It deserves
its own genus. So in her thesis, she proposed
the name Jalila, named after the Ninjalila River,
which is a tributary of the Ruhuhu near where
the fossils were found. Perfect. 2007, we have
a great name. Ninjalila. Case closed. Ah. But
here is the catch. And this is the part that
usually makes people outside of academia just
bang their heads against the wall. I'm bracing
myself. According to the International Code of
Zoological Nomenclature, the absolute stripped
rulebook for naming animals a PhD thesis does
not count as a published work. That seems wild
to me. I mean, it's a PhD thesis. It is peer
reviewed by a committee of experts. It's sitting
in the university library. People can read it.
It doesn't matter. The logic of the ICZN is that
a thesis is technically an exam paper. It is
a document for a degree, not for the permanent
public distribution of scientific knowledge.
Wow. So unless you take that thesis and turn
it into a book or an article in a formal scientific
journal, it just doesn't count. So even though
she described it perfectly and gave it a great
name, that name became what the notes call a
nomen nudum. Yes, a nomen nudum, Latin for naked
name. That sounds almost scandalous. It is taxonomically
scandalous. It means the name exists in the ether
but has no legal standing. Experts all knew about
Nujalila. They whispered about it at conferences.
They'd say, oh, yeah, you mean the Njalila specimen?
But if they wanted to write a paper about it.
If you wrote a formal paper about the Permian
ecosystem, you could not use the name as fact.
You had to put it in quotation marks or call
it the unnamed taxon from Gebauer 2007. It's
literally a ghost haunting the literature. Haunting
the literature for nearly 20 more years. In 2015,
another expert, Christian Kammerer, looked at
it and agreed, yeah, this is definitely its own
thing. Yeah. But he couldn't fix the naming rules
right then, so he just had to leave it as quote
-unquote Dixay and Asuta. Until early this year,
2026. Finally. Eva Gebauer teamed up with Michael
Mache. They published a formal article in a recognized
journal. They redescribed the fossils. They validated
the genus. And they officially legally stamped
the name Jalila Nasuta into their record books.
76 years. That is a very long time to wait for
a birth certificate. It really is. But it's crucial
work. Because without this bureaucratic housekeeping,
we cannot accurately map biodiversity. Right.
If we don't know what species were real and which
ones were just misidentifications, we can't understand
the ecosystem at all. We can't know how many
predators the environment could actually support.
Well, speaking of support, let's talk about that
ecosystem. Because the Dila wasn't living in
a vacuum. The Usuli formation sounds like an
incredibly rough neighborhood. Ruff is an understatement.
If you were a time traveler stepping out into
that lush floodplain, you would be in immediate
extreme danger. Even from Jalila? Sure, Jalila
was a capable hunter, but it was living in the
shadow of absolute giants. The sources mention
Inostrancivia. Now, wait a minute. I know my
prehistoric facts pretty well. Isn't Inostrancivia
the famous Russian Gorgon option? The massive
bear -sized one? It is. And this is a great connection
to some really recent discoveries, specifically
papers from around 2023 and 2024. Okay. For the
longest time, paleontology thought African and
Russian gorgonoptions were totally separate populations,
like they stayed in their own lanes geographically.
But they didn't. No, they didn't. We now know
that Inostrancevia actually migrated south into
Africa during the late Permian. That changes
the dynamic completely. So you are in Jalila,
you are the size of a wolf, you're doing your
thing in Tanzania, and suddenly this bear -sized
apex monster from Russia shows up on your turf.
Exactly. And it's a classic case of niche partitioning.
New Jalila simply could not compete with Inostrancevia
on brute strength. If they fought, New Jalila
loses every single time. Every time. So it had
to be faster. Or more specialized. Likely both.
That pinched snout we spent time talking about?
That precision bite? Right, the meat flies her
jaw? That suggests it was targeting very different
prey. While Instrancivia is taking down the massive,
heavily built herbivores and just smashing through
bone, Injolila is probably hunting the smaller
game using speed and accuracy. And there's plenty
of game to choose from. The notes list a whole
buffet of Dicenodonts. Dicenodons were basically
the wildebeest of the Permian. They were everywhere.
These are the herbivorous tusked relatives of
mammals, right? Yep. Some were small burrowers,
some were big like hippos. The landscape was
just covered in mixed herds of Dicinodon, Endothiodon,
Compsodon. So Nijalila is weaving through the
ferns, avoiding the giant Russian immigrants,
dodging the other big local predators like Rebidja
and snapping up these smaller Dicinodons. And
dodging heavily armored reptiles like Piraeusaurus,
too. Have you seen Amphidon? They're like spiky,
knobbly cows. And they're even early ancestors
of crocodiles hanging around in the streams like
Anagmystrophias. It was a high risk, high reward
environment. It really paints a vivid picture.
I think sometimes people view the Permian as
somehow empty compared to the dinosaur age, but
it was completely packed. Well, it was a massive
biodiversity hotspot. The late Permian was a
real peak of evolution right before the great
dying wiped almost all of it out. I want to touch
on exactly where Angelila fits on the family
tree before we wrap up. Because even though it
wasn't the biggest, the 2026 paper suggests.
It was actually quite advanced in some ways.
It wasn't just a primitive leftover. No, not
at all. It occupies a really interesting middle
ground. You know, since about 2018, we've formally
split Gorgonoptians into a Russian clade and
an African clade. And Jalila is firmly African.
Homegrown talent, yes. But he has some features
that look a lot like the later giant Rubigens,
the absolute top tier African predators. Specifically,
there was this detailed section in the notes
about. The vomer. The vomer, yes. It's a bone
in the roof of the mouth, right? It is. In primitive
Gorgon options, the vomer is flat and broad.
But in Jalila, the vomer narrows down into this
constricted splint or bar shape. Now, why does
that matter? Why are the authors excited about
a roof of mouth bone? Because it completely changes
the structural engineering of the palate. It's
usually associated with strengthening the skull
to handle higher bite forces or changing the
airflow for better breathing while you're holding
struggling prey in your mouth. It's what we call
a derived feature. It shows that Ninjalila was
evolving some of the exact same high -performance
engineering as the giant top -tier predators.
Even though it kept a much smaller body size.
Right. It's technically considered a sister taxon
to Arctognathus, but in some ways it looks like
it's trying to evolve into a rubegene. It proves
that evolution was actively experimenting with
this high -performance skull shape across different
size classes. There was one other detail in the
notes that I honestly found a bit sad. The other
ghost species. The original 2007 thesis actually
proposed a second species of Nujalila called
Insigna. Ah, yes, Nujalila Insigna, the one that
got away. What happened to it? Why didn't Insigna
get invited to the 2026 party? The 2026 peer
review process killed it. Garauer originally
thought one of the skulls looked just different
enough, it was maybe a bit more robust, had slightly
different proportions, so she thought it could
be a separate species. And Insigna means remarkable,
right? Yes. But when they did the final rigorous
analysis for the official paper this year, they
decided to be cautious. They looked at it and
decided it was just too similar to Nasuta. So
it wasn't a different species? Probably just
individual variation. Like how some domestic
dogs have slightly broader heads than others
of the same breed. So they officially labeled
it Injalila CF Nasuta. There you go, F. It stands
for confer. It basically means compare with.
It is scientist code for we think it's this,
but we are 100 % sure. So we are lumping it together
with the main species for now. So Jalila insignia
never actually became real. It died in the draft.
That is exactly how taxonomy works. A lot of
lumping and splitting. But the good news is at
least Nalila the genus itself is finally safe.
It has its formal papers. So bringing this all
together. Through this deep dive, we've reconstructed
a fierce, medium -sized predator with a totally
unique pinched face, navigating a lush world
filled with Russian giants and herds of Dysonodons.
A truly key player in the Permian ecosystem.
A highly specialized hunter. But the bigger story
here seems to be about the scientific process
itself. We tend to think of discovery as just
digging a bone out of the ground. You find the
bone, you win. But in this case, the actual discovery
was digging a name out of bureaucratic limbo.
The bone itself was found 90 years ago. It really
highlights that our entire understanding of the
past is filtered through these very rigid human
rules. The code of nomenclature, the definition
of what counts as a publication, the difference
between a thesis and a journal. Jalila was known,
but it was invisible because it didn't fit the
required format. And that is the slightly scary
part, honestly. And Jalila is one success story.
It got resolved because Gebauer stayed with it
for decades and Meisch helped push it over the
formal finish line. But every major natural history
museum on Earth has rows and rows of cabinets
filled with unidentified fossils or specimens
with temporary names scrawled on tags from 50
years ago. That is exactly the thought I want
to leave you, the listener, with today. We think
we know the cast of characters of the prehistoric
world. We buy the encyclopedias, we watch the
documentaries. But how many other monsters are
sitting in a museum basement right now? fully
excavated, maybe even described in a forgotten
thesis somewhere, just waiting for their paperwork
to clear. The naked names. They are out there.
We just haven't officially met them yet. It makes
a museum visit feel a little different, doesn't
it? You really start to wonder what you're walking
past. It does. It reminds you that science is
never truly finished. It is always a working
draft. On that slightly unsettling but endlessly
fascinating note, we're going to wrap up this
deep dive. Thanks for joining us to explore the
story of Injalila. the predator that waited 76
years for a name.