Mark Witton, Natural History Museum, LondonPaleontologists think they may have identified the oldest dinosaur known to science, a long-necked labrador-sized biped that lived on the ancient supercontinent Pangaea around 243 million years ago. Published this week (December 5) in Biology Letters, the findings push back the date for the dawn of the dinosaurs by at least 10 million years, though the authors and other scientists have cautioned that the fossils may represent a close relative of the dinosaurs rather than the earliest member of the dinosaur family.
The fossil evidence for the species, called Nyasasaurus parringtoni, was first discovered in the 1930s in southern Tanzania by Rex Parrington, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. One of Parrington’s students, Alan Charig, who studied the fossils for decades, thought the bones represented the earliest known dinosaur—but never published his conclusions.
In the new study—which lists Charig as a co-author—Sterling Nesbitt of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues systematically compared the skeletal fragments with those of other dinosaurs and their relatives, and found a number of features in the arm and vertebrae of Nyasasaurus that are characteristic of true dinosaurs. They concluded that Nyasasaurus was “either a dinosaur or the closest relative” of the dinosaurs.
At the very least, ...
