One of the oldest ever Jurassic dinosaurs has been discovered after it fell out of a drop-off at Lavernock Point in South Wales , back in 2014 . Now described in the journalPLOS ONE , this 201 - million - year - old dinosaur fill in a key moment in dinosaur phylogeny .
The age of the dinosaur is divided into three geological period . The Triassic set about 252 million years ago ; it was marked by the world ’s most extreme mass quenching issue have intercourse as theGreat Dying . The Jurassic began 201 million year ago , another clip period delineated by another , and middling less grave extinction upshot , theTriassic - Jurassic mess extinction . The Cretaceous start 145 million years ago , and was the time full point that bear both the famousT. rexandVelociraptor .
There is a lot that paleontologist do not acknowledge about the bound between the Triassic and the Jurassic , as the fossil record is relatively thin . The Early Jurassic , in particular , has plenty of alien in term of how the dinosaurs began to develop and dominate the land after the Triassic - Jurassic extermination , which killed off most one-half of the domain ’s species .
“ Theropod dinosaur are extremely rarefied in the Lower Jurassic and most reports are of only fragmentary remains , ” the authors notice in their written report . “ This rarity results in a considerable spread in our noesis of these animals at a prison term when , denotation are , theropod were radiate rapidly . ”
This new metal money , Dracoraptor hanigani , or " dragon thief , " will help to turn to this evolutionary disruption .
Dated to be 201.3 million years sure-enough , it seat mightily on the boundary between these two flow , right at the decimal point where scientist believe a monolithic variegation in dinosaur species set out to occur .
It is one of the oldest known Jurassic dinosaur ever discover , and represents one of the types of dinosaurs that immediately preceded the egress of the most powerful wolf of the Jurassic and Cretaceous , and eventually avian dinosaur – modern - twenty-four hour period birds .
The skeleton outline of D. hanigani . bone shaded green were turn up , those shaded orange were made from external moulding , and blue were bones tentatively but not confidently identified . The whitened bones are those that have been infer from symmetry . Martill et al./PLOS ONE
“ It ’s not until the Middle Jurassic that we get all the diversity and forms that you know from children ’s books , ” coauthor Steven Vidovic toldBBC News . “ So , everyone ’s been hunting for these really early Jurassic specimen , going to exotic place … and then a dyad of brothers stumble across something on a beach near Cardiff . ”
Remarkably , 40 per centum of its skeleton was discover , including seven of its tooth , its claws , foundation and most importantly its skull . This rare level of preservation means that many of the missing sherd can be accurately filled in by the paleontologist because of the symmetry constitutional in the skeleton .
At 2 metre ( 6.6 feet ) in length , this puerile dinosaur was clearly a meat - eater , havingserrated , needle - acute teethdesigned to slit and pick up slice of other animals or dirt ball . The “ stealer ” reference number from the fact that this shoreline predator was also likely a scavenger . Its willowy shape suggests that , much like the raptorial bird dinosaur that evolve later on , it was an agile beast , capable to steal bits of meat from deceased quarry that may have been felled by larger predators .
