#pistosaur

[he-who-needs-to-be-silenced]

Yunguisaurus

Did this a week ago after a paleostream

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

I’m currently recovering for a bought of heatstroke and need something to keep me awake and cognizant (the hazards of fieldwork during the summer). Do you have any interesting facts about early Triassic weirdos? Admittedly that’s my least known era of prehistory, though not from a lack of trying on my part.

Lystrosaurus may not be technically just Triassic, but it gets lumped with the Triassic weirdos because the weirdest thing about it happened in the Triassic - it was most tetrapods for a decent chunk of time. They were everywhere. They did amazingly. And they went extinct the second other stuff started showing up again. It's wild.

The Early Triassic was also just the time when marine reptiles exploded. That's when we get a lot of the weirdest marine reps. Hupehsuchians? The first Nothosaurs? Pachypleurosaurs? Heck, this is even when we see the first Pistosaurs

The problem with the Early Triassic is that it's not proportional. It only lasts for a little less than five million years. That's just way too short of a time for a geological slice to show major changes, especially when it's that old.

But! There are more! Erythrosuchus first shows up in the Early Triassic, and the first Dinosauromorphs definitely appeared as showed by footprints. And, of course, there were tons of Ichthyosaurs, exacerbated by the fact that they may have originally evolved in the Permian after all

I'm hoping the more we study the Earliest Triassic, the more weirdos we will find. But yeah, you gotta go to the Middle to see the weirdness *really* take off