The Hollywood epic dates back to the Triassic period, 250-200 million years ago, before the Jurassic period made famous by Jurassic Park. After four days of digging, a team of palaeontologists from the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM) managed to remove the rock block containing the fossilized skeleton and transport it to their research center.
According to the first sightings of this famous center, it is an example of a family of herrerasaurids, long-tailed bipedal carnivores that inhabited what is now Argentina and Brazil. “Not only is it one of the oldest dinosaur fossils in the world, it’s also in a very good state of preservation. This will give us a lot of information about the anatomy of these dinosaurs,” explains Rodrigo Temp Muller, head of the study.
“Surgical work”
It is potentially the second most complete fossil ever known in the herrerasaurid family, he said. The first was discovered in the same region in 2014, allowing the identification of a new species with hooked claws called gnathovorax cabreirai. Scientists will need a series of analyzes to be able to clearly determine whether the fossil extracted from the rock in May also belongs to this species.
A “very meticulous, almost surgical” job that could take “several months,” says Rodrigo Temp Muller. “The smallest fragment can contain information that we cannot access if it is damaged,” he said. At the end of the work, the results of the research should be published in a scientific journal.
Erosion accelerator
The pampas of southern Brazil, bordering Argentina and Uruguay, hide under the red soil nearly a hundred fossil-rich deposits that reveal treasures of knowledge about the age of the first dinosaurs. Heavy rains and floods in the region in May caused the death of more than 180 people and huge material damage.
As far as paleontological research is concerned, this exceptional rain played a beneficial role in part by “accelerating erosion”, thus discovering the fossil of the errerasaurid family, according to Rodrigo Temp, Müller.