Diictodon feliceps
Name: Diictodon feliceps [Cat-headed two weasel-tooth]
When: Late Permian Period, about 257 million years ago
Where: Diverse localities in Zambia, South Africa, and China
Claim to fame: Diictodon is the smallest well-known member of the dicynodonts, a diverse group of distant mammal-relatives who were the world's primary land herbivores during the Late Permian and much of the Triassic. Dicynodonts contain everything from the ground-hog-sized Diictodon to hippo-sized giants like Placerias of the Triassic Petrified Forest of Arizona and Kannemeyria of South Africa. One dicynodont genus - Lystrosaurus (size of a small pig) survived the "Great Dying" at the end of the Permian to become the world's most abundant land vertebrate in the Earliest Triassic.
Dicynodonts had a unique way of feeding, using their tusks and a beak like that of a turtle to pull up and chop plant material. For most, the tusks were their only teeth. In the case of Diictodon, only mature males had them, so, yes, the creatures I represent are little boys.
Dicynodonts are more closely related to mammals than to any other living animal, but that does not make them especially mammal-like. Although they might have had some hair, there in so particular evidence that they did. Were they cold or warm-blooded (or something in between)? Not clear, but some evidence points to their producing body heat, including the fossils for two individuals who died in their shared burrow, curled up together. Was this to share heat? It's plausible. Modern cold-blooded vertebrates don't cuddle up like this.
