Permian pelycosaurs may have cared for their young

This video from the USA is called Toddler reads dinosaur encyclopedia: ‘I’m also quite familiar with other prehistoric beasts such as the pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, & pelycosaurs’.

From Reuters:

Fossil shows parents doted 260 million years ago

LONDON – Parents have been doting over their offspring for a very, very long time, it seems. A South African fossil suggests pelycosaurs — intermediates between reptiles and mammals that lived in the Permian Period before the rise of dinosaurs — may have been caring parents 260 million years ago, scientists said on Wednesday.

Jennifer Botha-Brink of South Africa’s National Museum and colleagues found a fossilised group consisting of an adult pelycosaur and four juveniles arranged in a family group. The youngsters appear to be siblings.

At 260 million years old, this family predates the previously known oldest fossil evidence of parental care in terrestrial vertebrates by 140 million years, the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Also from the Permian:

260 million-year-old reptiles from Russia possessed the first modern ears

The discovery of the first anatomically modern ear in a group of 260 million-year-old fossil reptiles significantly pushes back the date of the origin of an advanced sense of hearing, and suggests the first known adaptations to living in the dark.

More about this: here.

Cotylorhynchus was one of the strangest synapsid reptiles of the Pelycosauria order and lived in the middle Permian, about 285-260 million years ago, in the wide swamps of the southern part of North America. It was a herbivorous reptile, easy to distinguish by its enormous body with a very small head and a very short neck. These large dimensions weren’t determined by a huge layer of fat, but just by the width of its chest. Its name was given in 1962 by Everett Olson; it derives from the Greek and means “cup snout”.