Sunday, December 12, 2010

Once Again, Texas Leads the Way

Ancient Tiger-Sized Predator Unearthed in Texas - Yahoo! News: "Paleontologists have unearthed a nearly complete fossil of a dimetrodon, a reptile-like predator that roamed the Permian landscape 287 million years ago.

This weekend, the team is working to transport the 400-pound animal's torso from its resting place in north Texas to Houston, where the fossil will be prepped for display in the newly renovated Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) paleontology hall in 2012.

Famous for the enormous fin on its back, dimetrodon is often mistaken for a dinosaur, although dimetrodons pre-dated dinos by millions of years. The creature could easily pass as a reptile, but dimetrodon wasn't precisely reptilian, either: It was a synapsid, a category that includes modern mammals. Think of dimetrodon as a very distant, very toothy cousin."

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