It can't be terribly comfortable to take a seat at the base of the dinosaur tree, but that's where a newly described creature, Nyasasaurus parringtoni, seems to rest. It's not yet certain, but Nyasasaurus could be the oldest dinosaur ever found, pushing the dawn of the dinosaurs, thought to have occurred about 230 million years ago, back in time another 15 million years.
While this discovery is unlikely to make too many people change their lunch plans, it does suggest that "dinosaurs emerged in the wake of the largest mass extinction of all time — the crash that occurred around the transition from the Permian to the Triassic period about 252 million years ago," writes the dinosaur blogger Brian Switek in Nature. Whether or not this beast, about the size of a Labrador retriever, was truly a dinosaur, it "sits near the base of the dinosaur family tree," one researcher tells Switek.
Chris Wickham of Reuters, fixing on the idea that the bones were discovered decades ago, leads with, "Researchers have found what could be the earliest known dinosaur to walk the Earth lurking in the corridors of London's Natural History Museum," which paints a more forbidding picture of London than even Dickens managed.
At The Atlantic, Megan Garber reproduces images of the Nyasasaurus bones with anterior and posterior views, cross-sections in transmitted light, a rearticulated sacrum in right lateral view, posterior sacral vertebra, and so forth. Had we world enough and time, I might try to figure out what I could learn from these images and the accompanying "interpretative drawings," but I'd rather spend my time admiring the artist's rendering above. Garber does a nice job of walking us through the clues that led researchers to conclude that this could be a dinosaur.
At National Geographic, Ker Than leads with, "Just when you thought dinosaurs couldn't get any older, the oldest dinosaur has been found in Africa, a new study says." I never thought that. Tanya Lewis at Science News reports that the discovery pushes the age of the dinosaurs back 10 million to 15 million years, to 243 million years ago. Isn't that a little too much precision for a change with a five-million-year margin of error?
Interestingly, Fox News also covered the story. Is there a political angle I'm missing?
-Paul Raeburn
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