. The dinosaur book : the ruling reptiles and their relatives. Dinosaurs; Reptiles, Fossil. very broad, robust bodies and strong, heavy legs, and as in other primitive anapsids there was no clearly defined neck. The last of the cotylosaurs, living through Triassic times, were diadectomorphs which were smaller than the large Diadectes of North America and the massive pariasaurs of Europe and Africa. Their development ran counter to the earlier trend towards giantism in this branch of the cotylosaurian reptiles. Known as procolophonids after the charac- teristic genus Procolophon (pro-KOL-o-fon)
. The dinosaur book : the ruling reptiles and their relatives. Dinosaurs; Reptiles, Fossil. very broad, robust bodies and strong, heavy legs, and as in other primitive anapsids there was no clearly defined neck. The last of the cotylosaurs, living through Triassic times, were diadectomorphs which were smaller than the large Diadectes of North America and the massive pariasaurs of Europe and Africa. Their development ran counter to the earlier trend towards giantism in this branch of the cotylosaurian reptiles. Known as procolophonids after the charac- teristic genus Procolophon (pro-KOL-o-fon), these animals evidently ranged widely throughout the world in Triassic times, since they are found in South Africa, central Europe, Scotland, and North America. An early type of procolophonid is to be found in the Lower Triassic genus, Procolophoti, of South Africa. Although small, Procolophon was robustly con- structed. It had a deep skull, narrow in the front and broad at the back. The pineal opening on the top of the skull was very large. The teeth were limited in number, and those in the back portion of both upper and lower jaws were somewhat broadened for chopping or cutting green plant food. In Lower Triassic times the procolo- phonids appeared also in central Europe where they had become specialized to the ex- tent that in some of them there were spikes on the sides or the back of the skull. Finally, the Middle Triassic of Scotland and the Upper Triassic of New Jersey yielded the most highly specialized procolophonids, the last of the cotylosaurs. They were charac- terized by a flattening of the skull and an ex- cessive development of the spikes on the sides and the back of the head. As in the other diadectomorphs, the pineal "eye" was large. The teeth had become far fewer but were highly specialized, for the back teeth were broad, sharp chisels, evidently use- ful for chopping and cutting food. A particularly fine specimen is the almost complete skeleton of
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookpublishernewyork, booksubjectreptilesfossil
