Brazilian paleontologists announced Tuesday they discovered the well-preserved and near-complete fossils of a pre-dinosaur predator that lived some 238 million years ago.
The creature, a Prestosuchus chiniquensis, was about seven meters (22 feet) long, weighed 900 kilos (one ton) and lived in the Triassic Period (250 to 200 million years ago), paleontologists from the Lutheran University of Brazil said.
A team led by paleontologist Sergio Furtado Cabreira and biologist Lucio Roberto da Silva found the fossils in the town of Dona Francisca, some 260 kilometers (160 miles) from Porto Alegre, the capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.
"It is something that we could never imagine -- the quality of preservation and the size of the fossils are sensational," said Da Silva in a university press statement.
Brazilian kids all over the country are psyched and will no doubt be accurately pronouncing the beast's Latin binomial in no time.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment