Correlating bones in other animals are colored the same, so you can really see just how bizarre their anatomy was. Paper https://www.cell.com/current-biology/comments/S0960-9822(16)30878-8

  • Bluegrass_Buddhist [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Skimmed the paper and it says that it pioneered digging niches that mammals would eventually fill, but it's not a synapsid. Is it actually ancestral to any modern day reptiles?

    • KasDapital [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      As far as we know no it isn't. The drepanosaurs are only known from the Triassic, but there's some evidence that they were very early diverging reptiles, and that it's unclear why they don't have a better record in the Permian.

      • Bluegrass_Buddhist [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        it’s unclear why they don’t have a better record in the Permian.

        God willing there's a whole bed of Permian specimens waiting to be found somewhere.