Friday 10 July 2020

It Is A Strange Fact Of My Life,

that I have always thought of dinosaurs as being big, 


I imagined the smallest as being like the ones in The Lost World : Jurassic Park movie, as seen above with Cathy Bowman, image credit MovieStilsDBI am guessing about 2 feet or so tall when on their hind legs, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I saw this,

image credit: Frank Ippolito/AMNH, a mini dinosaur! scientists have described a new species found in Madagascar as a teacup-sized example of Ornithodira, a group of the last common ancestors of dinosaurs and pterosaurs. The 237-million-year-old fossil was named Kongonaphon kely, which means "tiny bug slayer." K. kely is the smallest known species in a family of early dinosauromorphs called Lagerpetidae. These early examples of Ornithodira are known to be small, but with recent discoveries such as the tiny bug slayer, researchers are coming round to the idea that the smallness of discovered specimens is no accident,

"Although dinosaurs and gigantism are practically synonymous, an analysis of body size evolution in dinosaurs and other archosaurs in the context of this taxon and related forms demonstrates that the earliest-diverging members of the group may have been smaller than previously thought, and that a profound miniaturisation event occurred near the base of the avian stem lineage," the team writes in a new paper, 

you can see more and read about this mini almost T. rex at Science Alertfor myself I think he is rather cute, now this would make more sense, to clone one of these, every home with kids would have one!


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