Palaeosaurus

Palaeosaurus was a small sphenacodont, a lineage that includes therapsids. It was at least 1.5 metres (5 ft) in length. It lived in the equatorial Pangea. It was a medium-sized predator, feeding on insects and small vertebrates. It is one of the most primitive sphenacodontid and it is related to other sphenacodontids (or it may have been ancestral to them), such as Dimetrodon. It shares many structural features of the skull and skeleton with the more specialised sphenacodontids. Unlike Dimetrodon, it lacked the "sail".