New predinosaur fossil discovered

Paleontologists have come across the fossil remains of a surprising creature whose existence could rewrite the books on how dinosaurs came to be. The story as it is being rewritten is that the first dinosaurs on Earth were relatively pint-sized animals and spent 15 million to 20 million years low in the minor leagues of life’s pecking order before they became the world’s dominant animal life form.That idea runs counter to the prevailing theory that after dinosaurs first evolved, their numbers and their relative size exploded, quickly making them the dominant animal life form on Earth.The newly discovered fossil that is shaking up old theories of a rapid rise of dinosaur dominance is not a dinosaur but a very close cousin, given the name by its discoverers. It belonged to an archaic group of animals called “basal dinosauromorphs,” or predinosaurs.Dinosauromorphs had been thought to have gone extinct as the first dinosaurs began to appear on Earth roughly 228 million years ago.

In fact, the discovery last year of Dromomeron in New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch hills shows that the 18-inch-high creatures lived and died alongside early dinosaurs not much bigger than themselves.“We can no longer say predinosaurs went extinct, making room for the dinosaurs,” said one of Dromomeron’s discoverers, Nathan Smith, 27, a University of Chicago doctoral candidate and Field Museum research associate.The discovery captured the cover story of the journal Science. It was the first time that dinosauromorph fossils had been found alongside dinosaur fossils, proving they lived in the same time and place.