A whopping 252 million years ago, Earth was crawling with bizarre animals, including dinosaur cousins resembling Komodo dragons and bulky early mammal-relatives, a million years before dinosaurs even existed. New research shows us that the Permian equator was both a literal and figurative hotspot: it was, for the most part, a scorching hot desert, on top of having a concentration of unique animals. Here, you could find some of the first tetrapods to emerge from the water and live on land, living right next to newly evolved, dinosaur and crocodile-like reptiles. Many of these species were wiped out after an extinction which changed life on the planet forever.