Paleontologists out of the University of Wisconsin Madison made a discovery that changes everything we know about the early history and migrations of dinosaurs across Pangea, and it’s all thanks to the fossilized remains of a chicken-sized dinosaur found in Wyoming.
The beauty of science is that we can all believe one thing thanks to one discovery, and then another discovery comes along and completely rewrites the book. While some are terrified of everything they believe shifting in an instant, science wants that smoke. It needs that smoke. It lives and breathes that smoke.
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The prevailing belief that dinosaurs first appeared in the southern part of the Pangea supercontinent and then spread northward millions of years later is being thrown into question, with paleontologists now wondering if dinosaurs were roaming the northern regions of Pangea a whole lot earlier than they previously thought.
Publishing their findings in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, which sounds like a whimsical children’s fantasy series that will get darker as the series goes on, the team of researchers say they uncovered fossils of a new dinosaur species called Ahvaytum bahndooiveche in Wyoming back in 2013.
Radioisotopic dating revealed the fossils to be around 230 million years old, making it one of the oldest fossilized remains of a dinosaur ever discovered and the oldest ever found in North America.
This little chicken-sized dino might be small but could be an early relative of the sauropod, a group of massive, long-necked dinos including species like the brachiosaurus.
Its age coupled with its presence in Wyoming suggests that it emerged in both hemispheres of Pangea at nearly the same time, instead of the previously held belief of it slowly moving northward from the South.
Even its name, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, is a reference to its historical significance. As it was discovered in the ancestral lands of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, a Native American group that primarily lived in Wyoming, the tribe was asked to collaborate on its name. In the Eastern Shoshone language, its name means “long ago dinosaur.”
