Pet Dinosaurs?

By jtoney on January 13, 2011.

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Dino egg.

Awwww....
Just reported in this week's issue of Science:

A report of remains of a four foot dinosaur, ten to fifteen pounds, some 230 million years old. Perhaps not so sweet.

From The New York Times:

the little dinosaur was also a fleet-footed meat eater, with an agile body and long canines that were ideal for digging into prey.

From the paper's Abstract in Science:

Upper Triassic rocks in northwestern Argentina preserve the most complete record of dinosaurs before their rise to dominance in the Early Jurassic. Here, we describe a previously unidentified basal theropod, reassess its contemporary Eoraptor as a basal sauropodomorph, divide the faunal record of the Ischigualasto Formation with biozones, and bracket the formation with 40Ar/39Ar ages. Some 230 million years ago in the Late Triassic (mid Carnian), the earliest dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial carnivores and small herbivores in southwestern Pangaea. The extinction of nondinosaurian herbivores is sequential and is not linked to an increase in dinosaurian diversity, which weakens the predominant scenario for dinosaurian ascendancy as opportunistic replacement.

Tags
environment
evolution

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