A group of Argentine and U.S. paleontologists has discovered that fossil remains found years ago in northwestern Argentine belong to a heretofore unknown species of dinosaur that lived 230 million years ago, the scientists told Efe on Thursday.
The species, dubbed Eodromaeus, is the most primitive dinosaur found to date among the theropods, the linage including the carnivorous, bipedal predators that later gave rise to the birds, paleontologist Ricardo Martinez said.
Eodromaeus, the ancestor of some of the most famous dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor, "measured about 1.6 meters (5.2 feet) long, had a very long tail and neck and weighed not more than 7 or 8 kilos (15.5 to 17.5 pounds), very light, more or less the size of a turkey," he told Efe.
The specimens of the new dinosaur species were found in the Ischigualasto Park in the province of San Juan.
"Undoubtedly, this is a predatory carnivore, from the evidence above all in its teeth: they're teeth especially designed to cut meat," said Martinez, who works at the Universidad Nacional in San Juan.
Ischigualasto, which is 63,000 hectares (about 157,000 acres) in size, is one of the richest "fossil deposits" in the world, where in recent years scientists have found the remains of the most primitive dinosaur species known.
The scientist said that the remains of Eodromaeus were found in 1996, when they were catalogued as part of a species discovered in the park five years earlier and called Eoraptor.
It was in 2000, however, that scientists noticed that the remains - which include a fossilized skeleton that only lacks some vertebrae and two other almost complete specimens - belonged to another species, which led them to undertake a new investigation the results of which are being published Thursday in the U.S. magazine Science.
To date, it was thought that Eoraptor, which was discovered by Martinez in 1991, was a theropod, but thanks to this new find it has been proven that in reality it belonged to the sauropodomorphs, "the linage that gave rise to the largest known kinds of dinosaurs."
In the work presented to Science, the experts also claim that dinosaurs were more common and diverse in the Ischigualasto zone during the Triassic geological period than had been previously thought.
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