Amazing dragon fossils in China rewrite the evolution of the world's most massive dinosaurs

Xing Xu and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing examined the partial skeletons of ten individuals belonging to a new species of sauropod. Sauropods were among the greatest creatures to ever have walked Earth, a family of dinosaurs that includes Brontosaurus or Diplodocus.

The new species was named Lingwulong shenqi which literally means "Lingwu's amazing dragon", after the city near the place where it was found.

This new dinosaur has the distinction of being the oldest diploid found to date, repelling the appearance of advanced sauropods by 15 million years. Diplodocoidea is a superfamily of sauropod dinosaurs, which included some of the longest animals of all time, including thin giants like Supersaurus Diplodocus Apatosaurus and ] Amphicoelias ]

Lingwulong was not as tall as his most famous cousins, the largest individual identified by Chinese scholars being about 18 meters (57 feet) tall. long. Like most sauropods, the "Amazing Dragon" must be gathered in groups and be held on a vegetarian diet. Because his neck was not as long as other sauropods, scientists believe that Lingwulong grazed on low plants with his teeth resembling stakes.

Being the first member of his evolutionary family (Diplodocoidea), the discovery of the dinosaur in East Asia – who lived at a time when the region was still connected to other continents – will probably require Paleontologists re-evaluate how sauropods appeared and evolved. Before this dinosaur was identified, the dominant line of thinking was that advanced sauropods appeared in the late Jurassic and quickly spread across the planet. Now, it seems that these dinosaurs evolved earlier and spread more slowly than previously thought.

Fossils of neosauropods have been found in North America, Europe, and East Africa, but none have been more than 160 million years old. found in Asia

"The new discovery challenges conventional biogeographic ideas, and suggests that the dispersion in East Asia has occurred much earlier than expected," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Communications . "Additionally, the age of this new taxon indicates that many advanced sauropodium lines were invented at least 15 million years earlier than expected, reaching global distribution while Pangea was still a consistent mass . "

There are still many unexplored areas in China that Xu and his colleagues hope to explore in order to further unravel the sauropod family tree.

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