STL Science Center

STL Science Center

01 August 2014

How Was I Missed?

Somehow I managed to miss a rather interesting South American theropod dinosaur. The small theropod lived in the Late Triassic approximately 232 million years ago and is considered a basal dinosaur, some have even gone so far as to call it the "Eve" of dinosaurs. The skeleton was discovered in 1996 in Argentina by Ricardo Martinez and Jim Murphy in the Valle de la Luna Member of the Ischigualasto Formation. Initially the remains were thought to belong to a new species of Eoprator, previously discussed on this blog, but Paul Sereno, Martinez, and others that have looked at the remains determined that the animal was not a species of Eoraptor but a new species belonging to a new genus was named as Eodromaeus murphi. Like the "Dawn Thief" the "Dawn Runner" was an early dinosaur but unlike its near cousin, it is still considered a theropod; subsequent papers have named Eoraptor as an early sauropodomorph though this is still questioned.

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