Extinct Creatures-- Shringasaurus indicus (Patreon)

A paper was published a few days ago describing this dude, and included a skeletal reconstruction that made it look.... pretty unreal, so I decided I had to draw it! I recommend doing a google image search for this guy, one of the top results is the skeletal reconstruction. When I saw it I laughed, it looked fake. But that's kind of a trend in Triassic animals, a lot of them are just... weird, to the point that they look like Fake Animals. So for the next week I'll be posting a Triassic weirdo a day, to catch up on all the paleo posts I've missed lately and also because it's fun!

So for the first weirdo, we have Shringasaurus indicus, a pretty big herbivorous archosaur from what is now India. It has very cool horns, which are a sexually dimorphic trait, meaning it's a trait that differs between the sexes. So the dude Shringasaurs probably fought with each other to compete for mates or territory using those horns, just as modern horned and antlered creatures do.

"Archosaur" is the name of the group that contains crocodylomorphs, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs, but during the Triassic there were many more groups of archosaurs than just those three.

I think I've mentioned this before, but between the Permian and the Triassic, there was a mass extinction. A BIG mass extinction. It wiped out something like 70% of land animals and 96% of marine creatures. That means that during the Triassic, everything was competing to fill the niches that were left vacant by the extinction. Archosaurs were pretty good at doing so, and this is why there are suddenly like a million new groups of archosaurs, including dinosaurs and pterosaurs and crocs.

And the allokotosaurians, such as S. indcicus! This animal has such a Crystal Palace vibe. It looks like what we thought dinosaurs looked like when we first dug them up, and for that, I think this critter is pretty neat.

See you tomorrow for another Triassic Weirdo!