Professor Richard Butler has written a piece for The Conversation, in which he discusses a new species of Triassic reptile, Teleocrater rhadinus, which fundamentally challenges the status quo of dinosaur origins.
'What did the ancestors of dinosaurs look like? For decades, our knowledge of close dinosaur relatives has been based largely on animals like the Triassic Period reptile Marasuchus, a tiny, squirrel-sized critter that moved rapidly on two legs.
Dinosaur ancestors, according to the conventional story, looked much like dinosaurs, just shrunken down to the size of something you might accidentally squash under your foot. However, in a new paper in the journal Nature, my colleagues and I describe a new species of Triassic reptile, Teleocrater rhadinus, which fundamentally challenges this status quo of dinosaur origins.'...