The discovery of the dinosaur & # 39; First Giant & # 39; is a huge evolutionary finding

The discovery of the "first giant" dinosaur provided a gigantic clue to how these paleo-beasts became the largest animals to walk on Earth.

The newly identified bus-sized beast – named Ingentia prima which means "first giant" in Latin – weighed up to 11 tons (10 metric tons) and measured up to 32 feet (10 meters) long.

But the size of the dinosaur is not the only feature that has impressed paleontologists. I. prima lived about 215 million years ago, a good 47 million years before his long neck cousins, including Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus existed, according to the researchers. [Photos: School-Bus-Size Dinosaur Discovered in Egypt]

"This new discovery was a pleasant surprise, and I think it is one of the most important discoveries of dinosaurs in recent years," Steve Brusatte, paleontologist at the 39, University of Edinburgh in Scotland who was not involved in the study, said Live Science. "These new fossils force us to rethink when, and how, the dinosaurs have become so huge."

Paleontologists thought that the first giant dinosaurs evolved early in the Jurassic, which lasted from 199.6 million to 145.5 million years after the supervolcans fragmented cracks in the supercontinent Pangea broke out. Brusatte said, "But this discovery changes this simple story," he said. I. prima and other lessemsaurids (large Late Triassic dinosaurs that all belong to the sauropod group) that the researchers studied "tell us that at least a few dinosaurs could reach enormous heights during the latter part of the The early dinosaurs – small two-legged creatures about the size of a golden retriever dog – appeared about 240 million to 247 million years ago, during the Triassic period. Previously, researchers thought that dinosaurs needed straight legs to reach gigantic heights, in part because the straight legs provided support as dinosaurs grew larger

because the main researcher, Cecilia Apaldetti, paleontologist at the National University of San Juan, Argentina, and his colleagues found that these outbreaks, unlike their later cousins, developed throughout the year. In addition, the hamsaurids had long necks and tails, but they were not as long as Diplodocus note the researchers.

Lessemsaurids shared a big feature with other long-necked sauropods: They had birds – like air sacs, breathing structures that may have helped keep giant animals cool, the researchers said. However, although the Lessemsaurids shared this characteristic with later sauropods, they were not the ancestors of the Giant Neck sauropods as Brontosaurus . On the contrary, lessesaurids and late sauropods have reached their massive size independently of each other.

"These new discoveries tell us that dinosaurs were much more adaptable and creative to reach a huge size than we had ever thought of, which means the studies were published online yesterday (July 9) in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Original article on Live Science.