The new species is classified as a dinocephalian therapsid, or mammal-like reptile, and was found in a valley near the pampas region of Rio Grande do Sul in 2008, hence gaining its name Pampaphoneus biccai.

Pampaphoneus means pampas killer, while Biccai was in honour of the man who owned the farm, Jose Bicca.

Dr Juan Cisneros, a former Wits doctoral student, and Cesar Shultz from Brazil discovered the fossil while a Wits team including  Prof. Bruce Rubidge, Dr Fernando Abdala and Ms Saniye Atayman-Guven helped study it.

According to Prof. Bruce Rubidge, Director of the Bernard Price Institute (BPI) for Paleontological Research at Wits, "the new species from Brazil is very closely related to a South Africa dinocephalian known as Australosyodon which we discovered on a farm close to Prince Albert Road in the southern Karoo in the late 1980's".

The find is both the oldest meat eating animal discovered in South America at 265 million years old, and stands as new evidence for the shape of Pangeae in the Middle Permian Period.

Similar finds have been made in Russia and China, while the Karoo is internationally renowned for the wealth of mammal-like reptile fossils it plays host to – indicating that these animals were able to move over land from Gondwana (South Pangaea) to Laurasia (North Pangaea) over 260 million years ago.