Asilisaurus

Asilisaurus
Life picture of Asilisaurus kongwe
Temporal occurrence
Middle Triassic ( Anisium )
247.2 to 242 million years
Locations
Litumba Ndyosi, Tanzania
Systematics
Archosauria Ornithodira Dinosauriformes Silesauridae Asilisaurus
Scientific name
Asilisaurus
Nesbitt et al., 2010
Art
Asilisaurus kongwe

Asilisaurus is a fossil genus of archosaurs from the family of Silesauridae that before about 240 million years ago - in the early Middle Triassic - in the south of present-day Tanzania lived. The only species and type species described so faris Asilisaurus kongwe , the first description of which was published in 2010. In this first description, the new taxon Silesauridae (Silesaurier) was introduced, whose name goes back to the Silesaurus opolensis discovered in2003 near Opole in Poland .

Asilisaurus was around 50 to 100 centimeters high at the hips, one to three meters long and weighed 10 to 30 kilograms. It had triangular teeth and a lower jaw with a beak-like tip, suggesting that it fed on plants or a combination of plants and meat.

The name Asilisaurus kongwe is derived from asili ( Swahili for ancestor ), sauros ( Greek : σαῦρος, lizard ) and kongwe (Swahili for ancient ). Asilisaurus kongwe is the oldest fossil of a dinosaur-like animal from the Triassic that has so far been found in Africa. In the first description it was placed in the vicinity of the Vogel ancestors (“within avian-line archosaurs”). From this it was deduced that the ornithodira began to fanned out around 245 million years ago.

The silesaurs were land vertebrates and are considered a sister group of the dinosaurs . Although the oldest dinosaur fossils discovered to date are only 235 million years old, it can be deduced from the Asilisaurus findings that the independent development of the dinosaurs began 10 million years earlier.

The holotype of genus and species is a dentate fragment from the anterior, left section of a lower jaw , which is kept in the National Museum of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam under the archive number NMT RB9 . The fragment was discovered along with other bone finds that could be assigned to at least 14 individuals of the same species. Its first description was supplemented by 12 paratypes from different body regions of several individuals.

Web links

• Dinosaurs Ten Million Years Older Than Thought. On: nationalgeographic.com of March 4, 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sterling J. Nesbitt, Christian A. Sidor, Randall B. Irmis, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, Roger MH Smith, Linda A. Tsuji: Ecologically distinct dinosaurian sister group shows early diversification of Ornithodira. In: Nature . Volume 464, No. 7285, 2010, pp. 95-98, doi : 10.1038 / nature08718 .
2. ↑ Dinosaurs and their closest relatives emerged earlier than expected. On: idw-online.de from March 5, 2010
3. ^ NMT = National Museum of Tanzania; RB = Ruhuhu Basin, the place where it was found