Ancient researchers at the Natural History Museum in London have recorded a prehistoric discovery: the oldest carnivorous dinosaur ever to live in the UK. Creature, named Pendrek Milnere, Set foot on Earth about 200 million years ago and is the best predator in the region in which it lived.
Stephen Spikeman, a museum researcher, said the carnivorous dinosaur was a regular theropad that walked on two legs. The discovery was made on the basis of four well-preserved bone fragments consisting of the spine, femur and hip, and the material was collected in a limestone quarry in South Wales in the 1950s.
“We only have these four pieces, but the protection is fantastic. The fossil is completely three-dimensional and it is not distorted,” Spikeman said. “We are beginning to see the first stages of dinosaur evolution. These animals eventually dominated the Earth, but by the end of the Triassic they were one of the many reptile groups living on the planet,” the archaeologist points out.
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Pendrek lived in the late Triassic, and the fossil may have lived 214 million years ago, long before the famous dinosaurs such as D. Rex and Velociraptor settled in the Cretaceous. Despite being at the top of the food chain, he was much smaller than these big predators.
The study with the discovery is available in the journal Science Royal Society Open Science.
Source: BBC
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