‘Cold Bone’, the first dinosaur from Greenland – It was a herbivorous biped that lived 214 million years ago (translation in the comments)
‘Cold Bone’, the first dinosaur from Greenland – It was a herbivorous biped that lived 214 million years ago (translation in the comments)
1 comment
The first dinosaur found in Greenland has been named ‘Cold Bone’ (‘Issi saaneq’ in the Inuit language). It lived 214 million years ago, and was a medium-sized bipedal herbivore with an elongated neck, the ancestor of sauropods, the largest animals ever to have lived on land.
The sketch of the new species is published in the journal Diversity by a team of Portuguese, Danish and German palaeontologists led by Victor Beccari of the New University of Lisbon.The researchers studied the well-preserved skulls of two specimens (one juvenile and one near-adult), found in 1994 during an excavation in eastern Greenland by palaeontologists from Harvard University. The skulls were subjected to computer microtomography and digitally reconstructed in 3D.’The anatomy of the two skulls is unique in many ways, for example in the shape and proportions of the bones: these specimens certainly belong to a new species,’ Beccari explains.
The two specimens lived 214 million years ago during the Late Triassic, the period when the fragmentation of the supercontinent Pangaea led to the formation of the Atlantic Ocean. “At that time the Earth was experiencing climatic changes that allowed the first herbivorous dinosaurs to reach Europe and go even further,” points out Lars Clemmensen of the University of Copenhagen.