Scientists find remains of huge ancient herbivore

BERLIN — A giant, plant-eating creature with a beak-like mouth and reptilian features may have roamed the Earth during the late Triassic period more than 200 million years ago, scientists said Thursday.

In a paper published Thursday by the journal Science, Polish researchers claim their find overturns the notion that the only giant plant-eaters at the time were dinosaurs.

The elephant-sized creature, known as Lisowicia bojani after a village in southern Poland where its remains were found, belonged to the same evolutionary branch as mammals.

Similar fossils from so-called dicynodonts have been found elsewhere, but they were dated to be from an earlier period, before a series of natural disasters wiped out most species on Earth.

“We used to think that after the end-Permian extinction, mammals and their relatives retreated to the shadows while dinosaurs rose up and grew to huge sizes,” said Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who co-authored the paper.

The discovery of giant dicynodonts living at the same time as sauropods — a branch of the dinosaur family that later produced the diplodocus — suggests environmental factors in the late Triassic period may have driven the evolution of gigantism, the researchers said.

Christian Kammerer, a dicynodont specialist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, said the size of Lisowicia was “startling.”