New twist in the mystery of the origin of dinosaurs.
For more than two centuries, paleontologists have been looking for and studying dinosaurs. To date, the oldest known dinosaur is Nyasasaurus Parringtoni who would have lived around 243 million years ago and whose fossils were found in Tanzania, near Lake Nyasa (hence his name). Other contenders for the “oldest dinosaur”: Eoraptor or herrerasaurus who both lived in Argentina 231 million years ago. However, there would be even older specimens that have not yet been discovered, say British paleontologists in a recent study.
“”These dinosaurs are well studied, but we still did not really know where they come from. Fossil archives have such shortcomings that cannot be taken at the foot of the letter“, underlines Joel Heath, co-author of the study and doctoral student at theUniversity College of London in a press release. Thanks to very sharp IT models based on known fossils and evolutionary trees of dinosaurs and their reptile parents, the researchers managed to determine the regions of the world where the first dinosaurs of the earth probably lived. “”It is a warmer and drier environment than you thought, made up of desert areas and savannas“, can we read in the study published in the journal Current Biology.
According to paleontologists, the first dinosaurs probably appeared in the Supercontinent Gondwana, a terrestrial area which has then divided and which now includes the Amazon in South America, the Congo basin and the Sahara desert in Africa. So far, no dinosaur fossil has been discovered in these regions. This could be explained by the fact that the researchers have not yet found the appropriate rocks, including their inaccessibility. This discovery is major because now, paleontologists know where to concentrate their research and do their excavations. It is only by digging more deeply that they will be able to discover the traces of the first dinosaurs to have set the earth.
The first dinosaurs were much smaller than their descendants: “More the size of a chicken or a dog than a diplodocus“Specify the researchers. They were walking on two legs (they were biped) and most were omnivorous (they fed on animal or vegetable origin).
