Huge Triassic mammal-like reptile discovered

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Friday, November 23, 2018

Giant mammal-like reptile rivalled Triassic dinosaurs in size

DINOSAURS of the late Triassic period had competition in the form of a huge ancestor of today’s mammals, scientists in Poland have revealed.

Researchers have named Lisowicia bojani, an elephant-sized dicynodont, part of a group known as the “mammal-like reptiles” — because of anatomical similarities to mammals, which evolved from similar creatures.

Mammals evolved not from dicynodonts, but from cynodonts, another branch of mammal-like reptiles.

Mammal-like reptiles dominated life on land for 50 million years before the evolution of the first dinosaurs but disappeared in the extinctions at the end of the Triassic that left dinosaurs dominant worldwide.

No, some cynodont mammal-like reptiles survived till the Cretaceous.

Dicynodonts coexisted with dinosaurs for much of the Triassic, but none has previously been found the size of Lisowicia, which was almost 15 feet long and nine feet high at the shoulder.

Polish Academy of Scientists researcher Dr Tomasz Sulej said Lisowicia, named for the Polish village of Lisowice, “changes our ideas about the latest history of dicynodonts.”

See also here.

The scientific description is here.

This 22 November 2018 video says about itself:

A humongous lizard mammal that lived alongside the dinosaurs over 200 million years ago has been discovered in Poland. The herbivorous creature, named Lisowicia bojani, was about 40 percent bigger than any other species of its kind, measuring 4.5 meters in length, 2.6 meters in height and weighing approximately nine tons. This is roughly equivalent to a the size of an elephant.