AGE:
Late Permian, Zone II, 250 million years ago

SIZE:
About the size of a domestic cat

MEANING OF NAME:
'Guardian of the Night'

PRONUNCIATION:
Nick-tea-frur-EE-tus

CLASSIFICATION:
CAPTORHINIDA: Procolophonia; Family Nyctiphruretidae

Represented is a skeleton of a small herbivorous reptile in the Parareptilia, a group thought ancestral to turtles.

Although in this ancestral group, Nyctiphruretus was quite unlike a turtle and probably far from the actual lineage of parareptiles that gave rise to them.

In the exhibition you will see a specimen of Nyetiphruretus skeleton still encased in preserved lake sediments.