Raptor Line: Fossil finds push back dinosaur ancestry
By Sid Perkins
Fossils of a newly discovered dinosaur species unearthed in Argentina suggest that the reptile’s lineage is older and more widespread than previously suspected. The finding might require scientists to remodel parts of the dinosaur family tree.
The creature, dubbed Buitreraptor gonzalezorum, belonged to a group of bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs called dromaeosaurids, the clan of raptors that includes the darting, humansize velociraptors made famous in the 1993 film Jurassic Park. An adult B. gonzalezorum would have been slender and measured about 1.5 meters from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail—”like a big rooster with long legs and a long tail,” says Peter J. Makovicky, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. He and his colleagues describe the dinosaur in the Oct. 13 Nature.