Palaeontologists
have found what is likely to be the oldest known dinosaur, filling in a yawning
evolutionary gap.
A study
in Biology Letters describes Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a new
species from 10-15 million years before the previous earliest dinosaur
specimens.
It
walked on two legs, measured 2-3m in length with a large tail and weighed
between 20 and 60kg.
The
find suggests that many millions of years passed between dinosaurs' first
members and their dominance on land.
"It
fills a gap between what we previously knew to be the oldest dinosaurs and
their other closest relatives," report co-author Paul Barrett, of the
Natural History Museum in London, told BBC News.
The
find shores up the idea that dinosaurs evolved on the southern parts of the
supercontinent Pangaea
"There
was this big gap in the fossil record where dinosaurs should've been present
and this fossil neatly fills that gap."
However,
the team behind the work has stopped short of definitively calling N
parringtoni the earliest dinosaur, because the fossil skeletons used to
define it were incomplete: one upper arm bone and six vertebrae.
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