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Description
Russia, 252 million years ago. An Inostrancevia, a 3.5 meter long ancient relative of mammals, crawls onto a log to bask in the Late Permian desert heat.

The color of the Inostrancevia’s skin was kinda inspired by the leopard gecko, just to point out that even some big primitive therapsids could’ve been quite colorful just like their reptile sisters (I get it they’re not called mammal-like reptiles anymore) and amniote predecessors.

I chose to depict it mostly hairless because we have a skin impression of an older therapsid called Estemmenosuchus, showing that it had glandular skin similar to a frog’s. And since both Inostrancevia and Estemmenosuchus are quite related I decided to give the former the latter’s integument. Another reason is because Inostrancevia lived in a very dry and hot desert habitat and would have been pretty active just like modern mammals, so I think it’s fur-covering would have been absent or very sparse to keep itself cool enough.

Description
Russia, 252 million years ago. An Inostrancevia, a 3.5 meter long ancient relative of mammals, crawls onto a log to bask in the Late Permian desert heat.

The color of the Inostrancevia’s skin was kinda inspired by the leopard gecko, just to point out that even some big primitive therapsids could’ve been quite colorful just like their reptile sisters (I get it they’re not called mammal-like reptiles anymore) and amniote predecessors.

I chose to depict it mostly hairless because we have a skin impression of an older therapsid called Estemmenosuchus, showing that it had glandular skin similar to a frog’s. And since both Inostrancevia and Estemmenosuchus are quite related I decided to give the former the latter’s integument. Another reason is because Inostrancevia lived in a very dry and hot desert habitat and would have been pretty active just like modern mammals, so I think it’s fur-covering would have been absent or very sparse to keep itself cool enough.