Meet the ancestors

I spent the afternoon in the old alma mater. Pottering around the Zoology Museum I bumped into one of the ancestors, admittedly a rather distant one. This is a cast of the fossilised skull of Dimetrodon, an extinct predatory land animal that lived during the Early Permian period, around 295–272 million years ago.  

Dimetrodon is often mistaken for a dinosaur in popular culture, but it had become extinct 40 million years before the first appearance of dinosaurs. It is reptile-like in appearance and physiology, but in reality it is more closely related to mammals than to modern reptiles. 

You wouldn't want to have met a Dimetrodon , they were up to 15 feet long and were  one of the top predators in Early Permian ecosystems, feeding on fish and tetrapods, including reptiles as well as amphibians.