World's Oldest Equatorial Dinosaur Found, Dating Back 230 Million Years
"It was roughly the size of a chicken, but had an exceptionally long tail."
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A recent study has revealed the discovery of the oldest equatorial dinosaur globally, as well as North America's oldest dinosaur. This chicken-sized creature, which lived approximately 230 million years ago, significantly alters our comprehension of dinosaur distribution worldwide, suggesting that their presence in the northern hemisphere dates back millions of years earlier than previously thought.
The dinosaur, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, was first discovered back in 2013 in what we now know as Wyoming. Once upon a time, this place was near the equator on the supercontinent Laurasia, which has since fragmented into North America, Europe, and Asia with the breakup occurring between 66 to 30 million years ago.
The fossils were retrieved from the Popo Agie Formation. It took Dave Lovelace, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, and his team years to determine that it was a new-to-science species, as well as how old it was. Having only parts of the dinosaur’s legs to work with, it wasn’t easy, but together they’ve established it was likely a very early relative of sauropods – the group that would later give rise to the vegetarian giants like Patagotitan.
Ahvaytum, on the other hand, was no such giant. Its name, inspired by the Shoshone language term for “long ago,” is a hat tip to quite how ancient this creature is. It’s now estimated to have lived 230 million years ago, something researchers were able to work out thanks to radioisotopic dating of rocks in the formation Ahvaytum’s fossils were found in. That puts it on a par with the oldest known Gondwanan dinosaurs, and raises questions about how and when dinosaurs first spread across the planet.
