PaleoartPaleoart (also spelled palaeoart, paleo-art, or paleo art) is any original artistic work that attempts to depict prehistoric life according to scientific evidence. Works of paleoart may be representations of fossil remains or imagined depictions of the living creatures and their ecosystems. While paleoart is typically defined as being scientifically informed, it is often the basis of depictions of prehistoric animals in popular culture, which in turn influences public perception of and fuels interest in these animals.
TyrannosauridaeTyrannosauridae (or tyrannosaurids, meaning "tyrant lizards") is a family of coelurosaurian theropod dinosaurs that comprises two subfamilies containing up to thirteen genera, including the eponymous Tyrannosaurus. The exact number of genera is controversial, with some experts recognizing as few as three. All of these animals lived near the end of the Cretaceous Period and their fossils have been found only in North America and Asia.
BatrachotomusBatrachotomus ˌbætrəˈkɒtoʊ-məs is a genus of prehistoric archosaur. Fossils of this animal have been found in southern Germany and dated from the Ladinian stage of the Middle Triassic period, around 242 to 237 million years ago. Batrachotomus was described by palaeontologist David J. Gower 22 years after its discovery. The locality where Batrachotomus lived was a swampy region and the name comes from the Greek batrachos/βάτραχος (frog) and tome/τομή (cutting, slicing), which refers to its preying on the large amphibian Mastodonsaurus.
CeratopsiaCeratopsia or Ceratopia (ˌsɛrəˈtɒpsiə or ˌsɛrəˈtoʊpiə; Greek: "horned faces") is a group of herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs that thrived in what are now North America, Europe, and Asia, during the Cretaceous Period, although ancestral forms lived earlier, in the Jurassic. The earliest known ceratopsian, Yinlong downsi, lived between 161.2 and 155.7 million years ago. The last ceratopsian species, Triceratops prorsus, became extinct during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, .
LoricataLoricata is a clade of archosaur reptiles that includes crocodilians and some of their Triassic relatives, such as Postosuchus and Prestosuchus. More specifically, Loricata includes Crocodylomorpha (the persistent archosaur subset which crocodilians belong to) and most "rauisuchians", a paraphyletic grade of large terrestrial pseudosuchians which were alive in the Triassic period and ancestral to crocodylomorphs.
ParacrocodylomorphaParacrocodylomorpha is a clade of pseudosuchian archosaurs. The clade includes the diverse and unusual group Poposauroidea as well as the generally carnivorous and quadrupedal members of Loricata, including modern crocodylians. Paracrocodylomorpha was named by paleontologist J. Michael Parrish in 1993, although the group is now considered to encompass more reptiles than his original definition intended. The most recent definition of Paracrocodylomorpha, as defined by Sterling Nesbitt in 2011, is "the least inclusive clade containing Poposaurus and Crocodylus niloticus (the Nile crocodile).
ErythrosuchidaeErythrosuchidae (meaning "red crocodiles" in Greek) are a family of large basal archosauriform carnivores that lived from the later Early Triassic (Olenekian) to the early Middle Triassic (Anisian). The family Erythrosuchidae was named by David Meredith Seares Watson in 1917. They were the apex predators of their day, with lengths of to almost . Their fossil remains are known to date from South Africa (Beaufort Group of the Karoo Basin), China, India and European Russia, from the Early to Middle Triassic.
Precociality and altricialityIn the biology of birds and mammals, altricial species are those in which the young are underdeveloped at the time of birth, but with the aid of their parents mature after birth. Precocial species are those in which the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth or hatching. Precocial species are normally nidifugous, meaning that they leave the nest shortly after birth or hatching. These categories form a continuum, without distinct gaps between them.
ErythrosuchusErythrosuchus (from ἐρυθρός , 'red' and σοῦχος , 'crocodile') is an extinct genus of archosauriform reptiles from the Triassic of South Africa. Remains have been found from the Cynognathus Assemblage Zone of the Beaufort Group in the Karoo of South Africa. In the Late Triassic, the ecological niche left by Erythrosuchus was filled by archosaurs including Saurosuchus and Postosuchus. Erythrosuchus was the largest predator of its time, and was around long.
ProtorosauriaProtorosauria is an extinct polyphyletic group of archosauromorph reptiles from the latest Middle Permian (Capitanian stage) to the end of the Late Triassic (Rhaetian stage) of Asia, Europe and North America. It was named by the English anatomist and paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley in 1871 as an order, originally to solely contain Protorosaurus. Other names which were once considered equivalent to Protorosauria include Prolacertiformes and Prolacertilia.
