Posted by
moneymaker
538 days ago
(http://www.mercurynews.com)
Category: Science Discovery Environment |
Buried among the dinosaur bones, a team led by UC Berkeley paleontologists discovered the remnants of the dinosaurs' predecessors, dinosauromorphs, that lived 15-20 million years after the first dinosaur showed up.
"It was very exciting because we knew this was a type of animal that no one thought you'd find anywhere at any time in North America," said paleontologist Randall Irmis, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study which appears today in Science.
The discovery means that dinosaurs didn't simply replace their ancestors. Instead, the two types of animals lived side-by-side and competed for resources for millions of years.
"It has shaken up the old theory," said Bill Parker, a paleontologist at Petrified Forest National Park who also studies dinosaurs. "Everything was nice and neat before."
Scientists thought dinosaurs evolved from the dinosauromorphs in South America. Then, they may have driven their predecessors to extinction by outcompeting them with their bigger, faster and stronger bodies. Or, their ancestors and other animals suddenly went extinct for another reason, and the dinosaurs took advantage of the newly empty ecological niches.
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