Bolosauridae
| Bolosauridae | ||||||||||||
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Low to medium perm | ||||||||||||
| 299 to 268 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Bolosauridae | ||||||||||||
| Cope , 1878 |
The Bolosauridae are a small group of the parareptiles , an extinct group of reptiles , and include their earliest representatives. They were herbivores and in the Permian they were widespread across the northern continent of Laurasia .
features
The skull was short and high and had an elongated, deeply located skull window (infratemporale) which was surrounded at the top by the cheekbone (jugale) and scaly bone (squamosum), below by the quadratojugale . The orbit was very large and about medium length of the skull. Her palate was toothless. A transverse outgrowth of the wing bone was on the same plane as the palate. The teeth were bulbous (bulbous, onion-shaped). The legs were unusually slim.
Genera
Two bolosaurs are Belebey from the Middle Permian of China and Russia and Bolosaurus from North America.
A third genus, the fossil remains of which were found in the Bromacker in Thuringia, is Eudibamus . The reptile, which lived in the lower Permian 290 million years ago, was the first animal to walk biped (on its hind legs). Popular scientific formulations such as “The first upright Thuringian” suggest that Eudibamus only walked on his hind legs. Instead, the animal likely only used this mode of locomotion to run faster and otherwise walked on all four legs. This so-called facultative bipede is e.g. B. also in the recent collar lizard or the helmet basilisk , both not closely related to Bolosauriden to observe.
The separation of the basal Eudibamus and the sister group Belebey / Bolosaurus is said to have taken place before the Carbon-Permian border.
literature
- Michael J. Benton : Paleontology of the vertebrates. Translation of the 3rd English edition by Hans-Ulrich Pfretzschner. Pfeil, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-89937-072-0 .
- Oskar Kuhn : Proganosauria, Bolosauria, Placodontia, Araeoscelidia, Trilophosauria, Weigeltisauria, Millerosauria, Rhynchocephalia, Protorosauria (= manual of palaeoherpetology. Vol. 9). Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart et al. 1969.
- David S. Berman, Robert R. Reisz, Diane Scott, Amy C. Henrici, Stuart S. Sumida, Thomas Martens: Early Permian Bipedal Reptile. In: Science . Vol. 290, No. 5493, 2000, pp. 969-972, doi : 10.1126 / science.290.5493.969 .
- Johannes Müller, Jin-Ling Li, Robert R. Reisz: A new bolosaurid parareptile, Belebey chengi sp. nov., from the Middle Permian of China and its paleogeographic significance. In: The natural sciences . Vol. 95, No. 12, 2008, pp. 1169-1174, doi : 10.1007 / s00114-008-0438-0 .
Web links
- Bolosauridae near Palæos