Most people think a meteor killed the dinosaurs - but that wasn’t Earth’s biggest extinction. The Permian-Triassic extinction ...

Behind the dinosaurs was a case with skulls of Permian synapsids. They don't get many visitors. Lystrosaurus, the synapsid that inherited the barren world of the Triassic, stared out empty-eyed.

A newly published review of 252-million-year-old fossils from southwest Germany is offering a deeper understanding of life’s ...

It forms the transition between the late Palaeozoic Era, which was mainly populated by synapsids, or mammal-like reptiles, and the Mesozoic Era, when the archosaurian reptiles, which includes the ...

This also marked the first time the earliest dinosaurs appeared. The Permian period’s mass extinction had wiped out the mammals that could have been competitors for these reptiles on land and in ...

One member of this group was a large, sail-backed animal called dimetrodon, which looks like it could be a dinosaur but isn’t. Then 252 million years ago came the Permian-Triassic extinction event.