Scientists announced the surprising discovery in Poland of fossils of a four-legged animal called Lisowicia bojani that demonstrated that dinosaurs were not the only large animals on Earth during the Triassic Period.
Lisowicia bojani:
Lisowicia is a genus of dicynodont synapsids that lived in what is now Poland during the Late Triassic Period. The Triassic was the opening chapter in the age of dinosaurs, followed by the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
Physical Appearance: It had a body shaped like a rhinoceros and a beak like a turtle.
Size: About the size of an elephant, it is the largest dicynodont known. It was the largest-known non-dinosaur land animal alive at its time and weighed 9 tons.
Nomenclature: The genus is named after the village Lisowice in Poland, where the only known specimen was found, while the specific name bojani honours Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus (1776–1827), a German naturalist who did pioneering work in comparative anatomy and paleontology.
Dicynodonts:
The new fossil, a partial skeleton described online this week in Science, is an ancient plant eater called a dicynodont; the name means "two dog tooth," referring to the characteristic tusks on the upper jaw, which resemble oversize canines.
‘Dicynodonts’ blended reptilian and mammalian traits. Apart from the tusks, dicynodonts were mostly toothless, with a horny beak like modern-day turtles.
These plant-eaters ranged in size from small burrowers to large browsers.
They're part of the large evolutionary group called ‘Synapsids’, which includes our mammal ancestors, and they were some of the most abundant and diverse land animals from the mid-Permian period into the Middle Triassic, before the first mammals evolved in the late Triassic.
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