Fossil bones of ancient dinosaurs unearthed
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A SITE containing the 220-million-year-old fossilized remains of nearly a dozen dinosaurs has been discovered in western Argentina, researchers said on Wednesday.
“There are almost 10 different individuals. It’s a mass of bones and there’s practically no sediment,” said Argentinian paleontologist Ricardo Martinez.
Martinez, of the University of San Juan, says the fossils are approximately 220 million years old, belonging to “an era of which we know little.”
“This discovery is important because there are seven or eight individuals of dicynodonts, the ancestors of mammals, the size of an ox,” he said, adding there were also remains of archosaurs, reptiles that could be the ancestors of great crocodiles.
The find was discovered in September last year in San Juan province, about 1,100 kilometers west of Buenos Aires.
The site is between one and two meters in diameter and about the same depth, leading scientists to speculate it was a former drinking hole at a time of a drought and the creatures died there. Argentina has been a rich source of Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous-era fossils and of creatures not yet found in the northern hemisphere.
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