What it is
A giant relative of the first four-legged animals, from rocks about 280 million years old in Namibia. Its head was broad and flat, and big fangs in the upper and lower jaws locked together at the front. Whole, it was longer than a person, bigger than any other early four-legged animal of its kind yet described.
Found in pieces
The first skeleton had weathered out of a hillside in five blocks that rolled down the slope one by one. Fitted back together, they hold the skull with its lower jaw and much of the backbone. Only the rear end, from just in front of the hips to the tip of the tail, is missing. A second, nearly complete skull turned up in the next valley.
In the wrong place
It lived about 55 degrees south, much closer to the South Pole than to the equator, as a great ice age was ending. Its closest known relatives, the colosteids, lived millions of years earlier in the warm tropics. Scientists had thought animals like these were replaced long before, so Gaiasia sends them back to rethink that picture.