Curious fossil could rewrite early days of the dinosaurs

sciencemag.org

How did the dinosaur become the dinosaur? Somewhere along the line, the ancestor of dinosaurs diverged from the ancestor of crocodiles, a momentous split in the evolution of vertebrates that ultimately set the stage for the age of dinos. But the details of that split remain mysterious, thanks to a dearth of fossils of early dinosaur relatives. Enter the newly identified 247-million- to 242-million-year-old Teleocrater rhadinus, a close relative of dinosaurs that also happened to walk on all fours and share some key features with the ancestors of crocodiles. These shared features, the authors say, suggest that it’s time to rethink what we thought we knew about dinosaurs’ earliest ancestors.

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