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Fossils unearthed on a hill in northwestern China are forcing scientists to rethink the story of a dinosaur lineage that produced the world's largest animals.
Scientists have announced the discovery of Lingwulong shenqi. the well-known group of herbivorous dinosaurs called long-necked sauropods, long tails, small heads and legs shaped like pillars. Lingwulong lived 174 million years ago during the Jurbadic period.
His name means "Amazing Lingwu Dragon", the nearest town to the site where a farmer spotted the fossils while keeping sheep
eight to ten Lingwulong individuals, the largest of which was about 17 feet ( 17.5 meters) long, said paleontologist Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
Lingwulong represents the earliest advanced advanced member of the sauropod lineage, defined by anatomical features that distinguish them from primitive sauropods that appeared tens of millions of years ago.
The discovery repels by 15 million years the appearance of advanced sauropods, a later lineage. would include Jurbadic giants such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus as well as Cretaceous behemoths such as Argentinosaurus, Dreadnoughtus and Patagotitan who were "Previously, we thought that all these advanced sauropods were born around 160 million years ago and have diversified and spread across the planet in a time window of only 5 million years, "says Paul Upchurch, paleontologist at University College London. "However, the discovery of Lingwulong means that this badumption is incorrect and we must now work with the idea that, in fact, this group and its major constituent lineages have been studied a little earlier and more gradually," he said. Mr. Upchurch.
Lingwulong lived in a warm and humid environment with lush vegetation including conifers, ferns and other plants. His neck was not as long as other sauropods, and he could have grazed on low, soft plants with his teeth resembling stakes. Because so many individuals have been found together, researchers suspect Lingwulong, like other sauropods, to live in herds.
Lingwulong belonged to a sauropod subgroup that was previously absent from East Asia because it evolved the rest of Pangea, a former supercontinent.
"Our findings indicate that East Asia was still connected to other continents at that time," said Xu.
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