Today's "I may be small, but my family will do great things!" not-quite-a-#dinosaur.

#Dromomeron wasn't as tiny as the pen implies (unless that's a really big pen!) but it wasn't large either: about a meter long, of which half was tail, and the whole thing lightly built. You could pick it up and cuddle it, and you know you'd want to.

Probably not on the dinosaurian lineage, but close—one of a number of #avemetatarsalians living in the mid-to-late #Triassic, 220-210 million years ago (mya). Biodiversity had barely recovered from the end-Permian "Great Dying" 250 mya when the climate threw another curveball in the form of the #Carnian #Pluvial Episode 234-232 mya, a Great Flood that makes "of Biblical proportions" seem kind of cute by comparison. The early Triassic biota had looked more like that of the late #Permian, only vastly sparser: it was later in the period, after the rains washed the remnants away, that dinosaurs and their close relatives began their rise.

Into this relatively empty world came Dromomeron and many other avemetatarsalians, all trying to fill open niches along with the crocodilians to round out the archosaur family tree. Only the dinosaurs and pterosaurs succeeded in the long term, but many others had a good run: the Dromomeron genus contains three named species and there were probably more.

Like all the rest, it wasn't a "failure" or a "dead end," except in the sense that everything is a dead end eventually. See it now not as bones frozen in rock, but a thriving animal, warm and active and alive. We can only hope to leave such a legacy.

(Art by Gabriel Ugueto. If you don’t know his work, you should.)