A few weeks ago we had a post on mammals in the Jurassic, contemporary with the dinosaurs. Now they are talking about mammals in the earlier Triassic era – go to http://phys.org/print366876776.html and published in PNAS Nov 16th (2015) www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1519387112
However they are being described as proto mammals (or nearly mammals), or even an ancestral branch of the mammal tree. Well, it seemed the branch fell off the tree during the late Triassic event (mass extinctions) as mammals became proper mammals in the Jurassic.