Clumsy Hunter

In the early Permian, a little less than 300 million years ago, life on land was rich and diverse, but most of the animals were still a bit... goofy.

This is a scene from the ecosystem preserved in the Texas Red Beds, where early relatives of today's amphibians, reptiles and mammals all still looked more or less like heavily built lizards. Eryops, a large predatory temnospondyl, is chasing down one of its smaller relatives, a Platyhystrix. The commotion has startled some large palaeodictyopterans, winged insects not closely related to anything living today. You can also find a couple of cockroaches and millipedes, not much changed since, and a bird-sized griffinfly in a background.

The area was mostly quite arid, but crisscrossed by many rivers. Along the rivers it was probably more humid and green, much like you can still see where rivers flow through deserts. The dry leaves on the ground are drawn after actual species known from fossils, but the little epiphytic ferns and fungi are mostly hypothetical.