LONDON: Dinosaurs roamed the Earth almost nine million years earlier than previously thought, a new study has suggested.
The study of footprints found in Poland from the early Triassic age indicate that the first dinosaurs emerged a few million years after a species wipeout, called Permian-Triassic extinction, but were a minor group in the panoply of life.
The footprints, thought to be about 250 million years old, are "the indisputably oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage", according to an international team which has named the creature that made the footprints Prorotodactylus.
These early dinosaurs were small, four-footed animals, but over the next 50 million years, their class diversified astonishingly, becoming leviathan herbivores and fleet-footed carnivores that dominated the planet, the 'Daily Mail' said.
The palaeontologists from Poland, Germany and the US, said the prints, along with those from two other slightly younger sites, provided important insight into the origin and early evolutionary history of dinosaurs.
As well as suggesting that the origin of the animals occurred in the immediate aftermath of Permo-Triassic event, they indicate that the earliest dinosaur relatives were very small animals.
Source: Times of India,6-10-2010
The study of footprints found in Poland from the early Triassic age indicate that the first dinosaurs emerged a few million years after a species wipeout, called Permian-Triassic extinction, but were a minor group in the panoply of life.
The footprints, thought to be about 250 million years old, are "the indisputably oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage", according to an international team which has named the creature that made the footprints Prorotodactylus.
These early dinosaurs were small, four-footed animals, but over the next 50 million years, their class diversified astonishingly, becoming leviathan herbivores and fleet-footed carnivores that dominated the planet, the 'Daily Mail' said.
The palaeontologists from Poland, Germany and the US, said the prints, along with those from two other slightly younger sites, provided important insight into the origin and early evolutionary history of dinosaurs.
As well as suggesting that the origin of the animals occurred in the immediate aftermath of Permo-Triassic event, they indicate that the earliest dinosaur relatives were very small animals.
Source: Times of India,6-10-2010
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