‘Amazing dragon’ fossils rewrite story of long-necked dinosaurs

Fossils unearthed on a hillside in northwestern China are forcing scientists to rethink the story of a dinosaur origin that constructed a largest animals ever to travel a planet.

Scientists on Tuesday announced a find of Lingwulong shenqi, an early member of a obvious organisation of plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods with prolonged necks, prolonged tails, small heads and pillar-like legs. Lingwulong lived 174 million years ago during a Jurassic Period.

Its name means “amazing dragon from Lingwu,” a closest city to a site where a rancher speckled a fossils while 
herding sheep.

The scientists excavated skeleton from during slightest 8 to 10 Lingwulong individuals, a largest of that was about 17.5 metres (57 feet) long, pronounced paleontologist Xing Xu of a Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led a investigate published in a journal Nature Communications.

Two technicians magnitude a shoulder bone of Lingwulong shenqi. (Xu Xing)

Lingwulong represents a earliest-known modernized member of the sauropod lineage, as tangible by anatomical traits that distinguish them from obsolete sauropods that initial appeared tens of millions of years earlier.

The find pushes behind by 15 million years a appearance of modernized sauropods, a origin that after would include Jurassic giants like Diplodocus and Brontosaurus as good as Cretaceous Period behemoths like Argentinosaurus, Dreadnoughtus and Patagotitan that were a largest land animals on record.

Previously, we suspicion all of these modernized sauropods originated around 160 million years ago and fast diversified and widespread opposite a world in a time window maybe as short as 5 million years,” pronounced University College London paleontologist Paul Upchurch, a investigate co-author.

“However, a find of Lingwulong means that this hypothesis is improper and we now have to work with a idea that, actually, this organisation and a vital constituent lineages originated rather progressing and some-more gradually,” Upchurch said.

One of a 4 quarries producing Lingwulong fossils. Scientists excavated skeleton from during slightest 8 to 10 Lingwulong individuals, a largest of that was about 17.5 metres (57 feet) long. (Xu Xing)

Lingwulong lived in a comfortable and soppy sourroundings with lush vegetation including conifers, ferns and other plants. Its neck was not as prolonged as some other sauropods, and it might have grazed on low, soothing plants with a peg-like teeth. Because so many individuals were found together, a researchers suspect Lingwulong, like other sauropods, lived in herds.

Lingwulong belonged to a sauropod branch that previously was suspicion to have been absent from East Asia since it evolved after that land mass separate from a rest of Pangaea, an ancient supercontinent.

“Our discoveries prove that eastern Asia was still connected to other continents during a time,” Xu said. 

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/lingwulong-sauropod-1.4759441?cmp=rss