[url=http://english.cntv.cn/2014/08/11/VIDE1407687959925609.shtml]Source[/url]
[quote]
An international team of experts, including scientists from the Natural History Museum and the University of Zurich, have discovered the first new dinosaur species in Venezuela. It's also the first found in the northern part of South America. La Quintasaura - as it's named - was around the size of a small dog, and had a diet of green ferns and the occasional insect.
They're hundreds of millions of years old, yet new species are still being discovered each year
At London's Natural History Museum, scientists have played their part in discovering a new species of dinosaur, the first to be found in Venezuela.
It's around 200 million years old and has been named Laquintasaura venezuelae, after its location.
Dr. Paul Barrett is a lead author of a paper outlining the discovery, which he says is very exciting.
"So, this dinosaur is really exciting because we've never found dinosaur remains in Venezuela before, that have been able to be named. Indeed, this is the first dinosaur from all of northern South America that's good enough to get a name of its own. So it extends dinosaurs into northern South America towards the equator, a region that they weren't living in before and we think that that might suggest that this area which was previously thought to be inhospitable for dinosaurs, may actually have been a lot easier for them, and they may actually have been quite abundant," Dr. Paul Barrett said.
The discovery was made along with Professor Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra from the University of Zürich.
And while the discovery of any species is enough to get experts excited, the location of this discovery is particularly interesting.
"We've been able to date the rocks that Laquintasaura came from very accurately using techniques that look at the amount of radioactivity in the rocks that surround the bones. These techniques suggest that Laquintasaura was about 201 million years old, which is only about half a million years younger than a major mass extinction event that affected all of life on earth around 200 million years ago. This suggests that dinosaurs got through that mass extinction relatively unscathed, or at least if didn't get through the extinction, they rebounded from it very quickly," Dr. Paul Barrett said.[/quote]
[img]http://p5.img.cctvpic.com/photoworkspace/contentimg/2014/08/11/2014081109543453276.jpg[/img]
stop the presses, we found Dino!
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f7/Dino_from_%22The_Flintstones%22.gif[/img]
But do they have feathers?
It always struck me as something strange, that, despite the northern part of South America having some of the oldest terrains in the world (Particularly Venezuela with its Tepuys) dinosaurs were never found there, up until now.
[QUOTE=ccib00;45680029]But do they have feathers?[/QUOTE]
[quote]The newly discovered dinosaur, named Laquintasaura venezuelae, belongs to ornithischians (bird-hipped dinosaurs) – a group which includes species such as Stegosaurus and Iguanodon.[/quote]
[url]http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/science-laquintasaura-venezuelae-new-herbivorous-dinosaur-venezuela-02092.html[/url]
Same stuff from the article:
[quote]“It is fascinating and unexpected to see they lived in herds, something we have little evidence of so far in dinosaurs from this time. The fact that it is from completely new and early taxon means we can fill some of the gaps in our understanding of when different groups of dinosaurs evolved.”
“The early history of bird-hipped dinosaurs is still very patchy as so few of them have been found,” said senior author Prof Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra of the University of Zürich.
“This early species plays a key role in our understanding of the evolution, not only of this group, but of dinosaurs in general.”
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Paul M. Barrett et al. 2014. A palaeoequatorial ornithischian and new constraints on early dinosaur diversification. Proc. R. Soc. B, vol. 281, no. 1791; doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.1147[/quote]
So, probably not, even though I wouldn't be surprised if they had at least some kind of protofeathers. Anyways, this is a quite important discovery, since the four specimen they've found show that herd-behavior in a very early stage is quite possible, especially at a time when Dinosaurs were practically scarce in comparison to other fauna.
It pains me that we'll never learn the intricacies of the dinosaur mind - like would a dinosaur pass the mirror test? Did they use tools like some birds do? And what forms of communication did they use? Was inter-species rivalry a thing? How about cooperation?
It has been just so damn long since they were extinct - it's sad that there is so much that we'll never learn about them.
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