A recently discovered dinosaur fossil apparently indicates that the dinosaurs' takeover of the world began in South America
65 million years ago, everyone knows, the story of the dinosaurs ended, but the beginning of the age of the dinosaurs is shrouded in fog. This is due to the small number of fossils that did not allow defining the time frame.
Now a dinosaur earlier than those known today has been discovered in New Mexico. A study recently published in the journal Science points to South America as the possible place for the origin of the dinosaurs.
The feathered animal, named Hallae Tawa, was the size of a large dog and boasted a long neck and tail, a narrow snout, and sharp curved teeth that helped catch and kill its prey.
Hallae Tawa is an early therpud, meaning it is related to birds and the mighty Rex. The age of the new fossil from New Mexico is about 213 million years, shortly before the beginning of the distribution of the dinosaurs on the whole planet.
Hallae Tawa seems to belong to the same group to which another dinosaur pioneer - Herrerasaurus - belonged, and the researchers say that it was also a theropod. Both lived at a time when the supercontinent Pangea existed, when all the continents of today formed one land mass. Because Hernosaurus was found in what is now the South American continent near some early sauropods and ornithochians. This suggests that the three main dinosaur lineages diverged early on. The researchers say this evolutionary pattern is consistent with the theory that the earliest dinosaurs spread across Pangea before the continent broke up.
The researcher Sterling Nesbitt was surprised by the state of preservation of the fossils, in relation to their age. "When we saw them, our mouths fell open. Many of these theropods had hollow bones, which were crushed during the decomposition process, but they are still in a good condition that allows us to restore them," said Nesbitt.
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There are feathers in the original article. Read carefully.
I understood that they managed to restore despite the fragments and you probably understood something else.
The assessment has always been for these environments, but there was no proof of this, now there is, as soon as they found a relative of dinosaur ancestors from South America in North America, a sign that he started the journey.
Anyway, thanks for the comments and review.
Avi, sorry, examples: the original news has no feathers. The matter of crushing the bones is stated as the correct fact for most of the dinosaur fossils, but in this case the bones were preserved, to the surprise of the researchers, intact ("pure", undamaged). And the title, it is not about dating the beginning of the dinosaur era, and the hypothesis is that the beginning of their era was 230 and not 213 million years ago (admittedly a small difference, but still...).
I am surprised by the fact that even in the original article it was said that such an early dinosaur had an affinity with birds, while I got the impression that dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds and therefore I expected only late dinosaurs to be close to them.
Point, what do you mean by "too ancient"?
Suspicions of forgeries must be checked. The fossil is too old
Now it's better? I wrote the whole news.
Abby, inaccuracies were a bit on the understatement, please check again.
Thanks. There were leftovers from the machine translation that I used not to translate the article but so that the difficult words would already be prepared and translated and I wouldn't have to look in Babylon every time a word I don't know appears, then I went through a sentence on the English version and the machine translation and rebuilt the sentences. No re-editing was necessary but the deletion of several words that had already appeared in the correct order a sentence earlier.
Father, it seems that some inaccuracies have fallen, at least compared to the original news.
Abby, the beginning of the third paragraph needs re-editing.