Fossil reptile discovery 'something extraordinary'

[muriel_volestrangler]

A newly discovered 250-million-year-old fossil reptile from Brazil gives an "extraordinary" insight into life just before the dinosaurs appeared.

At the time, the world was recovering from a massive extinction that wiped out most living species.

The reptile, named Teyujagua or "fierce lizard", is the close relative of a group that gave rise to dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds.
...
Its anatomy is somewhere between that of more primitive reptiles and the archosauriforms, which include all dinosaurs and pterosaurs (flying reptiles), along with modern day birds and crocodiles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35783598

An exceptional fossil skull from South America and the origins of the archosauriform radiation

Birds, dinosaurs, crocodilians, and pterosaurs all belong to the clade Archosauriformes, an extraordinarily diverse group that dominated terrestrial tetrapod faunas worldwide for nearly the entire Mesozoic Era, around 175 million years, and plays a major role in the modern biota, with birds comprising around a third of extant tetrapod biodiversity. The Permian origin of the clade and its major diversification during the Triassic following the end-Permian mass extinction event were events of exceptional significance that fundamentally reshaped ecosystems on land. Several classic anatomical features relating to carnivorous adaptations and cranial pneumaticity characterize the archosauriform skull. However, the acquisition of this highly successful cranial morphology from more primitive reptiles is poorly understood due to the patchy and fragmentary nature of the early archosauriform fossil record, and the absence of key transitional taxa showing intermediate morphologies.

The oldest known archosauriforms consist of rare and highly fragmentary remains from the Permian of Russia. Following the end-Permian mass extinction, c. 252 million years ago, fossils of archosauriforms and their nearest relatives become more common and globally distributed, but articulated specimens remain almost unknown outside a small number of well-sampled areas in South Africa and China. Here, we report a new, exceptionally preserved skull from the Triassic of Brazil, which is the most complete tetrapod fossil yet discovered from the Lower Triassic of South America. This skull represents a previously unknown species that is the sister taxon to Archosauriformes and which fills a major morphological gap in understanding of early archosauriform evolution.


http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22817

[HuckleB]

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