Mama Mia! Now <i>That's</i> A Fossil!
Fossil fragments found in a northern Italian quarry belong to a new species of dinosaur which lived 200 million years ago, one of the oldest meat-eating reptiles ever discovered, Italian paleontologists said Thursday.
The dinosaur was 26.4 feet long, weighed over a ton, and a long neck and sharp teeth 2.8 inches, Giorgio Teruzzi, supervisor of paleontology at Milan's Museum of Natural History, told The Associated Press.
It is believed to have lived in the early Jurassic era, usually associated with more primitive forms of carnivorous dinosaurs. The Jurassic era went from 208 to 140 million years ago.
"It is the world's oldest three-fingered dinosaur, and one of the oldest overall," one of the researchers, Cristiano Dal Sasso, said in an interview.
The dinosaur, tentatively dubbed Saltriosaur after the name of the quarry where the fossils were found, is very similar to another predator, the American Allosaur, but is believed to be 20 million years older.
"What's interesting about this dinosaur is that it is more specialized, it is closely related to the more advanced species," said Thomas R. Holtz, a paleontologist at the Department of Geology at the University of Maryland at College Park.
The fossils were found entombed in a limestone block in a quarry in Saltrio, north of Milan near the Swiss border, in 1996. Researchers only started studying them last year.
They include more than a hundred bone fragments, the longest measuring 16 inches altogether less than 10 percent of the entire skeleton. One tooth was also found.
Holtz said that 200 million years ago was a critical time for the evolution of meat-eating dinosaurs. It was then that they started evolving into truly fierce predators, he added.
"This specimen will be helpful in terms of the reconstruction of the dinosaurs' history and interrelations between various groups," Holtz said.
The Italian researchers said the discovery might add new elements to study the land movements over the ages.
"The finding shows that huge stretches of land had emerged in the Jurassic," said Teruzzi. Such a huge animal could not have survived if Italy was made up of a series of small islands, as some theories suggest, Teruzzi said.
Instead, what is now the Lombardy region and some parts of Switzerland must have been a single land mass by the Jurassic.
Fragments of other dinosaurs have been found over the past years near Naples and near Trieste, in northeastern Italy. Footprints have been found in Altamura and, last summer, in S. Giovanni Rotondo, both in the south.
The Saltriosaur fossils will go on display Friday at Natural History museums in both Milan and Besano, near the quarry.
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