An article published in the journal “Science” reports the description of Lisowicia bojani, an animal belonging to the group of dicynodonts that lived in today’s Poland during the Upper Triassic period. Tomasz Sulej of the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki of the Department of Organismal Biology of the Swedish University of Uppsala studied this elephant-sized animal that contradicts the idea that at the time big herbivores were all dinosaurs.

The two researchers reported the discovery together with their colleague Jerzy Dzik, also from the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in 2008 in an article published in the journal “Acta Palaeontologica Polonica”. Starting in 2005, at a site near the Polish city of Lisowice, many fossils of flora and fauna were found that lived in the Upper Triassic, between 205 and 210 million years ago. They included many already known species but also about a hundred disjointed bones that belonged to a species of dicynodont that was named after the city.

Dicynodonts (Dicynodontia) are of a suborder of therapsids, the large group that also includes mammals, which emerged in the Permian period, which means in the Paleozoic era. They survived the devastating mass extinction at the end of that period but Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki pointed out that paleontologists believed that in the Triassic mammals and their relatives, including dicynodonts, started living in dinosaurs’ shadow. The discovery of a species of herbivores that could exceed 4.5 meters in length, 2.6 meters in height and 9 tons of weight contradicts that idea.

Tomasz Sulej pointed out that the discovery of this new dicynodont changes the ideas of paleontologists regarding the last part of the history of this group of animals related to mammals. Lisowice bojani is the youngest dicynodont and the largest tetrapod that’s not a dinosaur dating back to the Triassic known so far. Its discovery leads paleontologists to wonder why it became so big, a question that can be extended to dinosaurs. What environmental characteristics allowed that growth of their size?

Dinosaurs and dicynodonts lived in the same period but there’s no evidence that they lived in the same habitat. This means that gigantism emerged in different ecosystems and at different times, since Lisowicia bojani may have been the last giant dicynodon while dinosaurs started increasing in size during that period. This makes the discovery of this species particularly interesting also considering that their mammalian cousins ​​grew at those levels only in the Eocene, many millions of years later.