Behind the dinosaurs was a case with skulls of Permian synapsids. They don't get many visitors. Lystrosaurus, the synapsid that inherited the barren world of the Triassic, stared out empty-eyed.

The first pterosaurs had a sail-like tensioning system for flying with potentially cumbersome tail vanes, which they could have used for displays, a new study finds.

Technically, the flying reptiles are ... the Lystrosaurus first existed in the Permian period, though it existed long enough to share the Earth with true dinosaurs in the early Triassic era.

Surprisingly, Earth’s creatures were highly diverse during the Carboniferous and Permian Eras (the time before dinosaurs ... Some of the flying insects had wingspans of up to two feet wide!

One member of this group was a large, sail-backed animal called dimetrodon, which looks like it could be a dinosaur but isn’t. Then 252 million years ago came the Permian-Triassic extinction event.

This also marked the first time the earliest dinosaurs appeared. The Permian period’s mass extinction had wiped out the mammals that could have been competitors for these reptiles on land and in ...

The creatures, found near Kotlas, lived in the Permian period (the last period of the Paleozoic Era) - that is more than 200 million years ago. Much earlier than the time of dinosaurs.

The oceans teemed with the coiled-shelled ammonites, mollusks, and sea urchins that survived the Permian extinction and ... Pterosaurs, a group of flying reptiles, took to the air.