The discovery of the ancient elephant herbivore called "amazing"

BERLIN "A giant creature that eats plants with beak-shaped mouths and reptilian features may have penetrated Earth during the late Triassic period over 200 million years ago, scientists said. In a paper published Thursday by the journal Science, Polish researchers claim that finding them overturns the idea that the only giants of plants that eat at that time were dinosaurs.

The elephant-size creature, known as Lisowicia bojani, after a village in southern Poland, where its remains were found, belongs to the same evolutionary branch as the mammals.

Similar fossils in the so-called scars were found elsewhere, but they were dated from a period earlier, before a series of natural disasters destroyed most of the species on Earth.

"We believe that after the final Permian disappearance, their mammals and relatives retreated into shadows while the dinosaurs rose and grew to huge size," said Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, a palaeontologist at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. -written the work.

The discovery of giant cyclists living at the same time as sauropods – a family of dinosaurs that later produced the iconic diplomat with a long neck – suggests that environmental factors in the late Triassic period would have led the evolution of gigantism, the researchers said.

Christian Kammerer, a dicynodont specialist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who is not involved in the discovery, said Lisowicia's size was "surprising."

"The big dikilodontes were known before in both Perm and Triassic, but never at this scale," he said.

Kammerer said that while there were drojdons and dinosaurs, there is still no evidence that they lived in the same habitats. It also questioned the conclusions of the study on Lisowicia's position.

"However, in general, I think this is a very interesting and important work and shows that there is still much to be learned about the relatives of the early Triassic mammals," Kammerer said.

Last year, a study proclaimed a Newly named species the heavyweight champion of all the dinosaurs – at 76 tons, the bean of the herb eating was as hard as a space shuttle.