© (Karolina Suchan-Okulska)Dicynodont
During the age of the dinosaurs, the story often told is that the thunder lizards ruled the earth, growing to the size of cars and busses while the ancestors of mammals and other animals were tiny little insect-eating fuzzballs, scurrying around during the night to avoid the reptilian teeth. But the fossil of an African elephant-sized creature found in southern Poland upends that narrative, reports Gretchen Vogel at
Science magazine.
The beast, named Lisowicia bojani, looked something like a cross between rhinoceros and a turtle, weighing in at nine tons. The creature is a dicynodont, one of the first groups of animals to eat plants. It's also part of a broader group of creatures called synapsids, which includes the direct ancestors of mammals, making it something of a cousin to the earliest mammal ancestors, or proto-mammals. The most intriguing thing about the creature, however, is that
it dates to the Late Triassic period about 201 to 240 million years ago when dinosaurs first began their reign. It was believed that by that period most other creatures had shrunk in size to hide from the giants, including dicynodonts, which maxed out at the size of a dog, but
L. bojani shows that's not the case. The research appears in the journal
Science.
Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh not involved in the study, tells George Dvorsky at
Gizmodo that the find is a big deal.
Comment: There's a reason so many countries are choosing Russian arms over American. The Russian engineers actually know what they're doing. See also: Russian defense ministry releases video of short-range anti-ballistic missile launch