Palaeontologists discover a diminutive grandfather of the dinosaurs in the U.S.

This specimen had a skull of only four centimeters. Dr. Federico Agnolin, researcher at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences (MACN) and CONICET, told the CTyS-UNLaM Agency that “this new species is an ancestor, a kind of grandfather of the dinosaurs and, by the shape of its teeth, we interpreted that it fed on insects that it captured nimbly among the ancient Texan forests “. After the great extinction of the Permian – the greatest extinction the Earth has ever known – a new era began, the Triassic period, and in which the dinosaurs originated. But dinosaurs did not dominate the world with ease and it took them millions of years to reach gigantic sizes. “The skull of the Soumyasaurus has many features that makes us think of the current birds, while we were able to recognize that it had a very sharp ear and a spectacular vision,” said the Argentinean researcher who carried out this research together with the specialists Volkan Sarıgül and Sankar Chatterjee of the Texas Museum.