#notadinosaur

New Quetzalcoatlus northropi items available in my Redbubble shop!

209 million years ago, dark clouds hover over a rolling Triassic ocean just off the coast of the massive super continent containing all terrestrial life. Below the waves strange and primitive creatures swim; fish dart around large rocks, always apprehensive of the shadows that pass through the murk of the open ocean. Suddenly without warning huge jaws come charging out from the other side of a rocky outcrop, snapping shut as the poor little fish struggles in vain against the inter-locking dentition of a predator perfectly adapted to catch slippery prey.

image credit: Fossilera and Fine Art America

This fossil is that of the Dimetrodon, which lived about 270-300 million years ago during the Permian period :) You may have seen them in those smol toy dinosaur sets, but fun fact: the most common misconception about this big boi (do yall think 11-ish feet is big??) is that it's a dinosaur. It's actually not; Dimetrodon died out millions of years before the first dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The interesting thing, though, is that the Dimetrodon is more closely related to mammals, like us, rather than any modern reptiles (they're not a direct ancestor of mammals tho). Thus, we can classify them as the fancy "non-mammalian synapsids" or simply "mammal-like reptiles".

The bigass spiny thing on the Dimetrodon’s back is called a “sail”, the role of which is debated but largely considered to have been used for thermoregulation AKA used to capture heat from the sun w that sPIcy amount of surface area ~ooOh~. Other less popular ideas argue that its purpose was for stability of the spine, courtship display, or some form of intimidation.