Revueltosaurus skeleton unearthed at Petrified Forest upsets dinosaur tale
Berkeley - The fossilized skeleton of a small crocodile relative excavated last year at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona throws a wrench into theories of how and where the dinosaurs arose more than 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period.
The animal, one of many creatures from the Late Triassic known only from their teeth, was thought to be an ancestor of the plant-eating ornithischian dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Triceratops, which roamed the world millions of years later in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
The fact that this presumed dinosaur, Revueltosaurus callenderi, is instead a crocodile ancestor does not merely disappoint rockhounds, who sell the abundant teeth as "dinosaur teeth," but it also throws into question the identity of other presumed dinosaur ancestors known only from teeth, which includes all Late Triassic ornithischians outside South America.
[....]
If, as the team concludes, the first ornithischians outside South America did not appear until 25 million years later than people thought, the picture of dinosaur evolution radically shifts.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/06/24_revuelto.shtml
I'm getting confused by this story, not being at all familiar paleontology/archeology - but are they saying that they relied on teeth to create the model of evolution for dinosaurs and now the teeth they used turn out to be from a completely different kind of animal?
So then, the ancestors of some dinosaurs they knew only from the teeth, when more of the animal is found, turns out it's not the ancestor but another branch that's unrelated. Is that right?
Berkeley - The fossilized skeleton of a small crocodile relative excavated last year at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona throws a wrench into theories of how and where the dinosaurs arose more than 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period.
The animal, one of many creatures from the Late Triassic known only from their teeth, was thought to be an ancestor of the plant-eating ornithischian dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Triceratops, which roamed the world millions of years later in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
The fact that this presumed dinosaur, Revueltosaurus callenderi, is instead a crocodile ancestor does not merely disappoint rockhounds, who sell the abundant teeth as "dinosaur teeth," but it also throws into question the identity of other presumed dinosaur ancestors known only from teeth, which includes all Late Triassic ornithischians outside South America.
[....]
If, as the team concludes, the first ornithischians outside South America did not appear until 25 million years later than people thought, the picture of dinosaur evolution radically shifts.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/06/24_revuelto.shtml
I'm getting confused by this story, not being at all familiar paleontology/archeology - but are they saying that they relied on teeth to create the model of evolution for dinosaurs and now the teeth they used turn out to be from a completely different kind of animal?
So then, the ancestors of some dinosaurs they knew only from the teeth, when more of the animal is found, turns out it's not the ancestor but another branch that's unrelated. Is that right?
