The latest exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, “Life Before Dinosaurs: The Permian Monsters,” is putting a spotlight on Permian research and local discoveries.

The Permian had remarkable biodiversity, including animals that may look and sound like dinosaurs, but were – in fact – not dinosaurs. Dimetrodon (pictured above) comes to mind here ...

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 Permian period immediately predated the dinosaurs. Ronchi said he was also “surprised by the abundance and preservation” of the fossils when he first saw the images. “It is the first ...

The climate was hot and dinosaurs flourished after the Permian, or Permian-Triassic, extinction (also known as the "Great Dying") eliminated nearly all marine and terrestrial life. This occurred ...

This plant comes from the Permian Period, around 275 million years ago, the last period before the age of dinosaurs. Plants such as this were used as evidence that continents were once connected ...

Unfortunately, the uppermost (youngest) rock layers in the Grand Canyon date back to the Permian period, before the time of the dinosaurs, meaning there are no dinosaur fossils preserved in the area.

They were the only group of dinosaurs to survive the Cretaceous mass extinction around 65 million years ago (not to be confused with the Permian-Triassic mass extinction that happened some 250 ...