Surprising: Argentine scientists find in Brazil fossil remains of an ancestor of flying reptiles

2023-08-20 20:00:00

And team of South American scientists in which specialists from the CONICET, found Fossil remains of a millennial ancestor of modern flying reptiles in Vale Vênetoa small village of Rio Grande do Sulsouth of Brazil.

As the researchers explained to the Nature magazine, the remains that were hidden among a group of rocks dating from about 230 million years ago correspond to a species that they named “Venetoraptor gassenae” and which belongs to a group of extinct animals called “Lagerpetidae”, whose fossils were originally found between rocks from the Triassic Period near the Puerta de Talampaya, in the province of La Rioja.

Its name derives from Veneto Valleya town near the site where the remains were found, and the word “rfitr”, which, in Latin, means looter and refers to his raptorial beak and his grasping hands.

Among the most striking physical characteristics of this thousand-year-old ancestor of the dinosaurs what He was about 1 meter tall and weighed between 4 and 8 kilos. their greatly enlarged prehensile hands, their sharp scythe-like claws that he used for attack or defend of their prey and Climb treesas well as his particular curved beak that precedes that of the dinosaurs by about a few 80,000,000 years.

“This finding challenges traditional ideas that the diversity of this lineage of reptiles flourished only after the origin of the dinosaurs and pterosauriyou,” he said. paleontologist Martín Ezcurra, CONICET researcher at the “Bernardino Rivadavia” Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences (MACN), where the reconstituted skeleton of this thousand-year-old flying reptile is found.

“We employ computational analysis with a large data set to test this hypothesis, venetoraptor constitutes a surprisingly new pterosaur precursorwith a bone anatomy unknown to the group, and shows us that there are important surprises waiting to be discovered in the Triassic rocks of South America”; added the specialist who had a fundamental role in the work,

For his part, Fernando Novas, a CONICET researcher at the MACN, stressed the great importance of this paleontological finding. “It is a source of pride that South American scientists lead the study of these exciting aspects of the evolution of life.”