Dimetrodon - Paleoecology

Paleoecology

Fossils of Dimetrodon are known from the United States (Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Ohio) and Germany, areas that were part of the supercontinent Euramerica during the Early Permian. Within the United States, almost all material attributed to Dimetrodon has come from three geological groups in north-central Texas and south-central Oklahoma: the Clear Fork Group, the Wichita Group, and the Pearce River Group. Most fossil finds are part of lowland ecosystems which, during the Permian, would have been vast wetlands. In particular, the Red Beds of Texas is an area of great diversity of fossil tetrapods, or four-limbed vertebrates. In addition to Dimetrodon, the most common tetrapods in the Red Beds and throughout Early Permian deposits in the southwestern United States are the amphibians Archeria, Diplocaulus, Eryops, and Trimerorhachis, the reptiliomorph Seymouria, the reptile Captorhinus, and the synapsids Ophiacodon and Edaphosaurus. These tetrapods made up a group of animals that paleontologist Everett C. Olson called the "Permo-Carboniferous chronofauna," a fauna that dominated the continental Euramerican ecosystem for several million years. Based on the geology of deposits like the Red Beds, the fauna is thought to have inhabited a well-vegetated lowland deltaic ecosystem.