Early dinosaur relative sported odd mix of bird, crocodile-like traits
Unusual museum specimen inspired search for more fossils
By
Elizabeth Eaton
2:22pm, April 17, 2017
While researching fossils in a museum in 2007, Sterling Nesbitt noticed one partial skeleton that was hard to place. Though the reptile — at the time, unofficially called Teleocrater rhadinus — was thought to be a dinosaur relative, it was an oddball. At about 2 meters long, it was larger than other close relatives, walked on four feet instead of two, and had an unusually long neck and tail. Since the skeleton was missing some key bones, it was hard to know where the creature, found in Tanzania in 1933, fit within Archosauria, the group that includes crocodiles, birds and dinosaurs.
Nesbitt, himself on the way to Tanzania for a dig, couldn’t shake thoughts of the strange fossil. “It would be nice if we found more,” the vertebrate paleontologist, now at Virginia Tech, remembers thinking.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/early-dinosaur-relative-sported-odd-mix-bird-crocodile-traits?mode=topic&context=76
