Early Archosaur Sported Strange 'Crocodile-Bird' Features - Sensationalist Headlines

[img]https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/2017/04/main/articles/041417_EE_dino_main.jpg[/img] [url=https://www.sciencenews.org/article/early-dinosaur-relative-sported-odd-mix-bird-crocodile-traits]Source[/url] [quote][i]Teleocrater rhadinus[/i][/quote] [quote]While researching fossils in a museum in 2007, Sterling Nesbitt noticed one partial skeleton that was hard to place. Though the reptile — at the time, unofficially called Teleocrater rhadinus — was thought to be a dinosaur relative, it was an oddball. At about 2 meters long, it was larger than other close relatives, walked on four feet instead of two, and had an unusually long neck and tail. Since the skeleton was missing some key bones, it was hard to know where the creature, found in Tanzania in 1933, fit within Archosauria, the group that includes crocodiles, birds and dinosaurs. Nesbitt, himself on the way to Tanzania for a dig, couldn’t shake thoughts of the strange fossil. “It would be nice if we found more,” the vertebrate paleontologist, now at Virginia Tech, remembers thinking. Now, a decade later, he and colleagues have done just that, discovering three additional partial skeletons of T. rhadinus — including bones missing from the original specimen. The more complete picture of T. rhadinus provides the first good glimpse of a pivotal moment of dino history. About 250 million years ago, Archosauria split into two branches: birdlike creatures (including dinosaurs) and crocodilians. Paleontologists have had a hard time finding the earliest members of the “bird” branch that lived within the first few million years after that split — and well before the origin of true dinosaurs (SN: 5/21/11, p. 22). T. rhadinus, which lived about 245 million years ago, fills that gap, Nesbitt and colleagues report online April 12 in Nature. With an odd mix of mostly birdlike — but some surprisingly crocodilian — features, the reptile is revising researchers’ view of early dinosaur relatives. When a femur was unearthed on a 2015 dig in Tanzania, Nesbitt saw that muscle-attachment marks on the bone were like the ones he saw in the museum specimen, confirming he had found the same species. Dinosaurs have similar markings on their femurs. Then, in the pile of bones Nesbitt’s team hauled back, he discovered ankle bones and parts of the skull that the original fossil lacked.[/quote]

that looks like the coolest dog ever

now we just gotta wait for someone to find evidence for that theory that proto-feathers go back to before dinosaurs, and pterosaurs, and maybe even crocodiles split up crocs with dinofur

Why does a crocodile-bird sound like the premise for a shitty sci fi original movie? Somebody get on this.

[QUOTE=_charon;52117734]now we just gotta wait for someone to find evidence for that theory that proto-feathers go back to before dinosaurs, and pterosaurs, and maybe even crocodiles split up crocs with dinofur[/QUOTE] It's very likely this is the case and it might actually be even crazier than that: It's now speculated that hair, feathers and scales all share a common ancestry over 300 million years ago, with them all being classifiable as placodes and that the same gene responsible for hair development, ectodysplasin A, also is used for scale development. The structures also develop similarly within embryos between birds, mammals and reptiles. Granted, that in itself doesn't prove when protofeathers first developed of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if pycnofibre-like structures were present on early crocodyliformes, especially if it is fully proven that many of them were warm-blooded, which seems likely and that the survivors of the K-Pg impact were specialized for being ectothermic.

[QUOTE=Mr. Sarcastic;52118966]Why does a crocodile-bird sound like the premise for a shitty sci fi original movie? Somebody get on this.[/QUOTE] Crocodactyl?

[QUOTE=Mr. Sarcastic;52118966]Why does a crocodile-bird sound like the premise for a shitty sci fi original movie? Somebody get on this.[/QUOTE] I think I remember a Syfy (i hate that spelling so much) original movie where the main antagonist was a reanimated trex skeleton with wings? It flew around and everything. That movie was.just as bad as you'd think