SAO PAULO – Brazil’s geological agency on Thursday announced a new species of dinosaur, a fast animal that lived in the desert during the early Cretaceous period.
The new species, called Farlowichnus rapidus, was a small carnivore about the size of a modern seriema bird, or about 60-90 cm (2-3 feet) tall, according to the researchers. This discovery was published in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research.
“From the large distance between the footprints found, it can be concluded that they were of a very fast reptile running across ancient sand dunes,” the geological service said in a statement.
The Early Cretaceous period lasted between 100 and 145 million years ago.
Fossilized dinosaur “tracks,” as scientists call them, were first discovered in the 1980s by Italian priest and paleontologist Giuseppe Leonardi in what is now the city of Araraquara, in the state of Sao Paulo.
Leonardi donated one of the footprint samples, found in the Botucatu formation, a group of rocks formed by ancient desert sands, to the Brazilian Museum of Earth Sciences (MCTer) in 1984.
The footprints are different from all other known dinosaur footprints, said MCTer paleontologist Rafael Costa.
2023-11-26 21:04:00
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