Latest Archosaurs Stories

New fossil material redefines Azendohsaurus as a peculiar early reptileAzendohsaurus just shed its dinosaur affiliation. A careful new analysis of A. madagaskarensis"”this time based on the entire skull rather than on just teeth and jaws"”aligns this 230-million-year-old animal with a different and very early branch on the reptile evolutionary tree. Many aspects of Azendohsaurus are far more primitive than previously assumed, which in turn means that its plant-eating adaptations, similar...

A team of paleontologists has unearthed a previously unknown meat-eating dinosaur from a fossil bone bed in northern New Mexico.The discovery settles a long-standing debate about early dinosaur evolution, and reveals a period of explosive diversification.  It also hints at how dinosaurs spread across the supercontinent Pangaea.A description of the new species, named Tawa after the Hopi word for the Puebloan sun god, appears in the Dec. 10 issue of the journal Science.The paleontologists...

By SUE VORENBERG New Mexico scientists discover fossilized remains of Typothorax with protective spikes By Sue Vorenberg The New Mexican Don't call them perverts, but when two New Mexico paleontologists found a spiked opening on a fossilized 210 million-year-old animal - - in a place the sun doesn't generally shine -- they realized they had discovered something exciting. The creature, called a Typothorax, appears to have had a protective cover over its naughty bits, although the actual...

The fossilized skeleton of a small crocodile relative excavated last year at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona throws a wrench into theories of how and where the dinosaurs arose more than 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period. This suggests that the herbivorous ornithischians and the meat-eating theropods, like Tyrannosaurus rex, did not evolve together in the Late Triassic as many paleontologists thought. Astrobiology Magazine -- The fossilized skeleton of a small...

Berkeley - The fossilized skeleton of a small crocodile relative excavated last year at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona throws a wrench into theories of how and where the dinosaurs arose more than 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period. The animal, one of many creatures from the Late Triassic known only from their teeth, was thought to be an ancestor of the plant-eating ornithischian dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Triceratops, which roamed the world millions of...