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 Prehistoric Animal Facts — Amazing Facts About Ancient, Extinct and Living Fossil Animals

Welcome to the Prehistoric Animals section of Amazing Animals Facts — a journey back through deep time to the extraordinary creatures that ruled the Earth long before humans ever existed! Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Complex animal life has existed for approximately 600 million years. In that vast span of time, life has produced an almost unimaginable diversity of extraordinary creatures — and the story of their rise and fall is one of the most thrilling narratives in all of science. 🦕 DIMETRODON — THE PREHISTORIC ANIMAL EVERYONE CALLS A DINOSAUR Dimetrodon is perhaps the most commonly misidentified prehistoric animal in popular culture — it appears in dinosaur toy sets and books worldwide, yet it is not a dinosaur. It is not even remotely closely related to dinosaurs. In fact, Dimetrodon is more closely related to you, a human being, than it is to any dinosaur that ever lived. Dimetrodon belongs to the synapsid lineage — the evolutionary group that gave rise to all mammals — and lived a staggering 40 million years before the first dinosaur evolved during the Permian period, approximately 295 to 272 million years ago. Its extraordinary sail — formed by enormously elongated vertebral spines that may have functioned as a solar-powered heating system — is one of the most recognisable features of any prehistoric animal and has made Dimetrodon a favourite subject of children's books and museum displays worldwide, even if almost always wrongly placed alongside the dinosaurs it never shared the Earth with. 🌿 TEMNOSPONDYLS — THE RULERS BEFORE THE DINOSAURS Before dinosaurs dominated the land, the dominant large predators of Earth's waterways were the temnospondyls — ancient, often enormous amphibians that ruled for over 200 million years, survived the catastrophic Permian-Triassic mass extinction that wiped out over 90% of all life on Earth, and may be the direct ancestors of all modern frogs, salamanders and caecilians alive today. Some temnospondyl species reached 9 metres in length — larger than any modern crocodile. 🐟 LIVING FOSSILS — PREHISTORIC SURVIVORS AMONG US TODAY Some prehistoric creatures have survived into the modern world virtually unchanged — living witnesses to the ancient past that walk, swim and fly among us today. The coelacanth was declared extinct 65 million years ago based on the fossil record — until a living specimen was found in a South African fisherman's catch in 1938. The lungfish has remained essentially unchanged for over 400 million years — it was ancient even when the first dinosaurs evolved. The Chinese Giant Salamander is a living relic of the Jurassic period, having changed little in 170 million years. The horseshoe crab — covered in our future articles — has remained virtually unchanged for 450 million years. The solenodon separated from its closest mammalian relatives 76 million years ago, before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. 🦖 COMING SOON — MORE PREHISTORIC FACTS This section is growing! Future articles will cover: 🦖 Tyrannosaurus Rex — the reality vs the myth 🦷 Megalodon — the prehistoric shark larger than a school bus 🐘 The Woolly Mammoth — and the ongoing debate about bringing it back through cloning 🐆 The Sabre-Tooth Cat — why its teeth were far more versatile than people assume 🦅 Pterosaurs — why they were not dinosaurs and how some reached the size of small aeroplanes 🌊 Mosasaurs — the ocean predators that make great white sharks look small ⭐ FEATURED AMAZING PREHISTORIC FACTS: • Dimetrodon lived 40 million years before the first dinosaur — and is more related to humans than to any dinosaur • Temnospondyls survived for over 200 million years — longer than the entire age of mammals so far • The coelacanth was "extinct" for 65 million years before being found alive • Some prehistoric dragonflies had wingspans of over 70 centimetres • The first land plants appeared after the first land animals — insects colonised land before plants did The history of life on Earth is far more strange, more dramatic and more surprising than any science fiction story. Our prehistoric animal articles bring the most extraordinary chapters of this story directly to you. 👉 Explore all our Prehistoric Animal Facts below and follow Amazing Animals Facts on Facebook! All content written originally by Geeta Singh | Amazing Animals Facts | geeta-singh.blogspot.com Sources: Wikipedia, Smithsonian Institution, Natural History Museum, Nature Palaeontology Journal
🐾 PREHISTORIC ANIMALS COVERED SO FAR
DimetrodonTemnospondylsCoelacanthLungfishSolenodon

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