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A sturdy mammal cousin, the size of an elephant eating horny-billed plants, roamed the European landscape alongside dinosaurs during the Triassic Period about 205 million to 210 million years ago , scientists said.
Scientists have announced the surprising discovery in Poland of fossils of a four-legged beast called Lisowicia bojani, which demonstrated that dinosaurs were not the only monsters on Earth at that time.
He also showed that the group of reptiles resembling mammals to which Lisowicia belonged, called dicynodontes, did not go out as long as previously thought.
"We think it is one of the most unexpected fossil discoveries of the Triassic of Europe," said paleontologist Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki of Uppsala University in Sweden. .
Lisowicia, the largest known non-dinosaur terrestrial animal of its time, was about 4.5 meters long, 2.6 meters tall and weighed 9 tons. The only other giants present at that time were the first members of the group of dinosaurs called sauropods, which had four legs, a long neck and a long tail.
"The skull and jaws of Lisowicia are highly specialized: they are toothless and their mouths have a horny beak, as in turtles and horned dinosaurs," Niedzwiedzki said.
The Triassic was the first chapter of the era of the dinosaurs, followed by the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The first dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago. Most early dinosaurs were small in size, overshadowed by large terrestrial reptiles, including formidable predators called rauisuchians and crocodile-like phytosaurs.
"The end of the Triassic period was not only the time of the rise of the dinosaurs, but also of the moment when the last dicynodontes decided to compete with the dinosaurs Finally, the dinosaurs won this evolutionary competition", said the paleontologist Tomasz Sulej of the Polish Academy of Culture. Institute of Sciences of Paleobiology.
Dicynodonts mixed the features of reptiles and mammals. Appearing for the first time millions of years before the emergence of the first mammals in the Late Triassic, the size of these phytophages ranged from small burrowers to large browsers. They became the dominant terrestrial herbivores in the Middle and Upper Triassic, but it was thought until now that they had died out before the dinosaurs became the dominant terrestrial animals.
Scientists have unearthed about a hundred bone specimens representing several individuals from Lisowicia in the Polish village of Lisowice.
An analysis of the creature's limbs showed that his bones had a rapid growth rate similar to that of a mammal or a dinosaur.
The research was published in the journal Science.
Australian Associated Press
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