Tiny Dinosaur Discovered That's Smaller Than a Chicken
- Mar 3
- 1 min read
An almost complete 90-million-year-old fossil provides the "missing link" for a mysterious group of prehistoric animals.
Researchers in Patagonia have found a well-preserved and nearly complete skeleton of one of the world’s smallest-known dinosaurs, named Alnashetri cerropoliciensis.
It was about the size of a crow and probably hunted small animals like lizards, snakes, mammals and invertebrates, reports NBC News. For decades, they have remained a mystery because most of the well-preserved fossils were found in Asia, while records from South America were fragmented and difficult to interpret.
"Going from fragmentary skeletons that are hard to interpret, to having a near complete and articulated animal is like finding a paleontological Rosetta Stone," says Peter Makovicky, lead author on the paper published in Nature. "We now have a reference point that allows us to accurately identify more scrappy finds and map out evolutionary transitions in anatomy and body size." The discovery of this nearly complete skeleton opens up a new understanding of how its lineage evolved, shrank and spread across the ancient world, reports phys.org
The researchers say that the fossil was once a small female that lived in a desert environment and died after reaching age four, so almost fully grown. After dying, its body was quickly covered by a sand dune, accounting for its fine level of preservation. Apart from birds, which evolved from small feathered dinosaurs, Alnashetri is the most diminutive dinosaur known from South America and rivals the smallest ones discovered globally.
