Kannemeyeriidae
Encyclopedia
Dicynodont
Dicynodontia is a taxon of anomodont therapsids or mammal-like reptiles. Dicynodonts were small to large herbivorous animals with two tusks, hence their name, which means 'two dog tooth'...
s. They were the dominant large terrestrial herbivores through most of the Triassic period
Triassic
The Triassic is a geologic period and system that extends from about 250 to 200 Mya . As the first period of the Mesozoic Era, the Triassic follows the Permian and is followed by the Jurassic. Both the start and end of the Triassic are marked by major extinction events...
. Well known genera
Genus
In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...
include Kannemeyeria
Kannemeyeria
Kannemeyeria was a large dicynodont of the family Kannemeyeriidae, one of the first representatives of the family, and hence one of the first large herbivores of the Triassic...
, Sinokannemeyeria
Sinokannemeyeria
Sinokannemeyeria was a large , long snouted, Chinese dicynodont with downward-pointing tusks that grew from bulbous projections on its upper jaw. The muscle attachment sites on the back of the skull were quite small, which suggestd that Sinokannemeyeria did not have powerful skull muscles for...
, Dinodontosaurus
Dinodontosaurus
Dinodontosaurus is a genus of dicynodont therapsid. It was one of the largest herbivores of the Triassic and had a beak corneum...
, and Placerias
Placerias
Placerias was a dicynodont that lived during the late Carnian age of the Triassic Period...
.
Phylogeny
Below is a cladogramCladogram
A cladogram is a diagram used in cladistics which shows ancestral relations between organisms, to represent the evolutionary tree of life. Although traditionally such cladograms were generated largely on the basis of morphological characters, DNA and RNA sequencing data and computational...
modified from Surkov and Benton (2008) showing the phylogenetic relationships of kannemeyeriids: