Oldest evidence of dinosaurs found in Polish footprints
Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - 23:31
in Paleontology & Archaeology
The oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage - fossilised tracks - is described this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, an animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now Poland. This fossilised trackway places the very closest relatives of dinosaurs on Earth about 250 million years ago - 5 to 9 million years earlier than previously described fossilised skeletal material has indicated. The paper also described the 246-million-year-old Sphingopus footprints, the oldest evidence of a bipedal and large-bodied dinosaur...