A new genus and species of long-necked herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Triassic period has been identified from fossils found in northern Switzerland.
Schleitheimia schutzi (left) and Plateosaurus (Right). Image credit: Beat Scheffold.
Schleitheimia schutzi lived approximately 210 million years ago (Triassic period) in what is now Switzerland.
The ancient animal is one of the first representatives of Sauropodomorpha, a large group of long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs that includes sauropods and their ancestral relatives.
“Sauropod dinosaurs are certainly among the most visible elements of Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate fauna,” said lead author Professor Oliver Rauhut of the Bavarian Natural History Collections and Ludwig-Maximilians University and colleagues in his article. Germany and Switzerland.
“They include the largest terrestrial vertebrates and were the dominant herbivores in many Jurassic and Cretaceous ecosystems, probably representing a large part of the vertebrate body mass in many environments where they were abundant.”
“However, the origin and early evolution of the group is even less understood.”
Fossilized fragmentary remains of Schleitheimia schutzi They were found in the Swiss canton of Schaffhausen.
Fossils were long considered to belong to Plateosaurus, a genus of herbivorous dinosaurs that lived during the Triassic period, about 214 to 204 million years ago, in what are now Central and Northern Europe, Greenland, and North America.
Professor Rauhut and his co-authors re-examined the specimens and concluded that they were from a different species of sauropodomorphic dinosaur.
“Although Schleitheimia schutzi it probably looked a lot like PlateosaurusThis dinosaur with an estimated body length of 9-10m (29.5-33ft) is already significantly larger than the latter, “paleontologists said.
“The new species was apparently very robust and, like its gigantic descendants, probably moved on all fours, while Plateosaurus most walked on their hind legs
The discovery of Schleitheimia schutzi It shows that at least three different species of early sauropodomorphic dinosaurs lived 210-220 million years ago in what is now Switzerland.
“Schleitheimia schutzi it is a derived sauropodiform and could even represent the immediate external group of sauropods, “the researchers said.
“In the context of a phylogenetic analysis, the new species indicates that the Triassic / Jurassic extinction event probably had only a minor effect on the evolution of the sauropodomorph, and that the rise of sauropods was delayed until the late Late Jurassic, when Other early lineages of the sauropodomorph perished. in the Pliensbachian / Toarcian extinction event and gave way to explosive radiation from that clade. “
The team’s article was published in the July 1, 2020 issue of the Swiss Journal of Geosciences.
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OWM Rauhut et al. 2020. A derived sauropodiform dinosaur and other sauropodomorphic material from the Late Triassic of canton Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Swiss J Geosci 113 (8); doi: 10.1186 / s00015-020-00360-8
