Slightly annotated photo of a Permian therapsid skull on display in the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Another photo of this same skull is here. This reptile needs an orthodontist.
Slightly annotated photo of a Permian therapsid skull on display in the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Another photo of this same skull is here. This reptile needs an orthodontist.
I love Middle Permian tetrapods. They’re so wacky. It’s like every clade had their own idea of what was cool and everybody was doing their own thing. Then dinosaurs got lucky – and got things more or less right from then on. It took synapsids a while to catch up via mammals.
I used to teach a class about the evolution of dinosaurs and permian tetrapods. I showed a picture of Estemmenosuchus and wrote a caption beneath it that said “Estemmenosuchus had a face made for radio… and horrid nightmares.”
Oh, and the cladistics pedant in me is pointing out that therapsids aren’t reptiles, they’re classified as synapsids. Although they used to be lumped into the catch-all category of “mammal-like reptiles,” which is incorrect from a taxonomic standpoint.