Diictodon
| Diictodon | ||||||||||||
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Diictodon , life-size model in the State Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe . |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Upper Perm | ||||||||||||
| 258 to 251 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Diictodon | ||||||||||||
| Owen , 1876 |
Diictodon was a herbivorous terrestrial vertebrate belonging tothe synapsids . It lived in the Upper Permian and fell victim to the mass extinction on the Perm-Triassic border . Fossils have been found in China and South Africa, including specimens at the bottom of spiral earth structures.
features
Diictodon was about 45 centimeters long, of which the skull was nine centimeters. Except for two tusks in the males it was toothless. The intertemporal region between the two synapsid cranial windows was narrow and allowed for well-developed jaw muscles. Longitudinal grooves on the premaxillary and the dental speak for a horn beak on the jaw tips. The skull shows no adaptations to a digging way of life, but the clawed, wide forefeet and the rest of the postcranial skeleton do. The trunk was cylindrical, the limbs short and thick, the tail very short.
Way of life
Diictodon lived in self-dug earth structures, which spiraled about half a meter into the depth and had an enlarged chamber at the end. He probably used his front feet to dig and his back legs to push away the loosened soil. Possibly used diictodon also burrows that were created by other animals. It fed on roots and tubers .
swell
- Thomas S. Kemp: The Origin & Evolution of Mammals. Page 48, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005. ISBN 0198507615 .
- Corwin Sullivan, Robert R. Reisz and Roger MH Smith, The Permian mammal-like herbivore Diictodon, the oldest known example of sexually dimorphic armament , Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 2003 270, 173-178, doi : 10.1098 / rspb.2002.2189 online PDF
