After the recent find that the terrifying tyrannosaur was actually ‘slowpokes’, here comes another discovery to pamper your imagination of a dinosaur chasing at a lightning speed. But, it is not among those huge giants, but a small, agile plant-eater.
The newly discovered primitive dinosaur species — Eocursor parvus — lived in the Late Triassic period, i.e. about 210 million years ago, to be unearthed in South Africa’s Free State.
Comprising skull and skeletal material like bones of the backbone, arms, pelvis and legs, the dinosaur species is by far the most complete example of a Triassic ornithischian ever known.
It is not a simple find for the researchers, as the Eocursor provides clues to the Ornithischia’s – the group that includes the well known herbivorous dinosaurs Triceratops and Stegosaurus — early evolution. Not just that! The creature also provides the earliest evidence for many skeletal characteristics’ origin.
Explaining the find, Dr Richard Butler, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London, UK said,
We know ornithischians were a very successful and important group of plant-eating dinosaurs that first appeared 220 million years ago, in the late part of the Triassic Period.
Though this fossil find was first identified in 1993, it is only recently that it is appraised.
This finding is significant as fossil record for some plant-eaters though is not too bad, for the ornithischians, there is almost nothing – letting the scientists to anchor on to this finding for getting into the roots of dinosaurs.