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Animals that lived before the dinosaurs looked like fat lizards with very small heads and had a semi-aquatic lifestyle like that of a hippopotamus, according to fossils recently unearthed in France. The amphibians, which represent a previously unknown genus and species of mammal ancestor, measure about 12 feet (4 meters) in length, the researchers report in the October issue of the journal. Palaeo Vertebrates , published online in July. They dub a new species Lalieudorhynchus gandi ; it lived about 265 million years ago in Pangea supercontinent, just before the era of the dinosaurs. The unusual animal fossil was first discovered in 2001 in the Lodève Basin in southern France, by study co-author and paleontologist Jörg Schneider, a professor in the Department of Paleontology and Stratigraphy at the University of Freiberg in Germany, and doctoral candidate Frank Körner. They found two large ribs, each measuring 24 inches (60 centimeters) long, in a rocky riverbed. During subsequent

Mammals and birds generate their own body heat and control their body temperature. Mammals and birds generate their own body heat and control their body temperature. This process is known as endothermic, or warm-blooded, and may be one reason why mammals tend to dominate nearly every global ecosystem. Warm blooded animals are more active both day and night than cold blooded animals and they reproduce more quickly. However, until now it is not known exactly when endotherms came from the ancestors of mammals. Our new study, just published in Nature, changes that. A combination of scientific intuition, fossils from the Karoo region of South Africa and cutting-edge technology has provided the answer: endothermy developed in the ancestors of mammals about 233 million years ago during the Late Triassic period. The origin of mammalian endothermy has been one of the great unsolved mysteries of paleontology. Ma