“seemingly drawn at random from evolution’s spare parts box,” -— Sounds like the winners of the Democrat primaries.
Hearing this early “dinosaur” discribed, I wondered if it might actually have been a therapsid so looked at the original article. There I found another interesting article about a weird early mammal find that is 66 million years old.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/29/world/crazy-beast-ancient-mammal-scn/index.html