Newly Discovered 240 Million-Year-Old ‘Dragon’ Fossil Fully Revealed – Deinocephalosaurus Orientalis Unearthed

The complete fossil of Deinocephalosaurus orientalis dating back 240 million years has been exposed.Reuters

The National Museum of Scotland announced on Friday (2/24) that the new fossil recently discovered by archaeologists is like the last piece of the puzzle, allowing scientists to fully reveal the appearance of a 240 million-year-old “dragon”.

The statement mentioned that this reptile about 5 meters long comes from the Triassic period of China. It was first discovered in 2003, but scientists have studied five other newer species in the following 10 years, and now they can finally Outline its full picture and name it “Dinocephalosaurus orientalis”.

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Nick Fraser, curator of natural sciences at the National Museum of Scotland, who participated in the research, said that the last fossil unearthed completely connected the previous fossils, “from the tip of the nose to the tail, beautifully showing a complete species.”

“It has a figure-eight curl, which is easily reminiscent of a Chinese dragon,” Fleiss said.

Dinocephalosaurus and Dinosauria belong to the same subclass Archosauria, but they belong to different groups, and their strict classification is more similar to their close relatives.

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These fossils help scientists understand this mysterious creature. Scientists from Scotland, Germany, the United States and China published the findings in the Transactions of the Earth and Environmental Sciences of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

According to information, this batch of fossils was originally owned by Li Chunchun, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2003, he accidentally discovered a small piece of vertebral bone in a piece of limestone in a small village in Guizhou Province.

Local farmers then took Li Chunchun to a pig pen. Li Chunchun discovered that there were other similar rock fragments, and finally pieced all the fragments together, and finally discovered a new species, named “Oriental Deinocephalosaurus”.

Fraser said that based on newly discovered fossils, it was found that Deinocephalosaurus Oriental had 32 vertebrae, so its neck was particularly long, like a giraffe, which was speculated to be beneficial for fishing. But he stressed that scientists are still studying the exact function of the long neck.

Fraser said that the fossils in the stomach still retain fish, which shows that Oriental Deinocephalosaurus was very adapted to the marine environment, and its flippers strengthen this hypothesis.

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2024-02-24 04:42:49