Illustration of the Triassic dinosaur Huayracursor jaguensis. Image courtesy of Jorge Blanco.
Joel Kontinen
Some Darwinist thinks that the evolution of dinosaurs followed a pattern of first small, then big.
A 230-million-year-old fossil found in Argentina shows that the evolution of sauropod dinosaurs’ long necks began earlier than previously thought.
High in the Argentinian Andes, a team of palaeontologists has found a small dinosaur fossil with the first hints of the extended neck that distinguishes sauropod dinosaurs like Diplodocus.
Named Huayracursor
jaguensis, the fossil is a partial skeleton from a dinosaur that lived in the
Triassic period, around 230 million years ago. It would have been around 2
metres long, weighing about 18 kilograms.
Later,
sauropods such as Brontosaurus and Patagotitan would become some of the
largest and longest-necked animals ever to have lived, reaching lengths of over
35 metres and weights of more than 70 tonnes.
Until
recently, evolutionists thought that the precursors of these
long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs, known as sauropodomorphs, were small,
short-necked and possibly omnivorous.
Other
sauropodomorphs living at the same time as H. jaguensis were much
smaller, around a metre in length, and showed no signs of the lengthening of
the neck bones seen in the newly found species. It wasn’t until several million
years later that sauropodomorphs began to significantly increase their body
mass and lengthen their necks, palaeontologists thought.
The
discovery of H. jaguensis at Santo Domingo Creek in north-west
Argentina, made by Martín Hechenleitner at Argentina’s National
Scientific and Technical Research Council and his colleagues, changes the evolutionary story of how these dinosaurs got
their long necks.
“Huayracursor breaks
somewhat with this idea of a gradual transition, because it coexisted with its
small, proportionally shorter-necked relatives,” says Hechenleitner.
The
dinosaur had a small skull compared with its contemporaries, robust hind limbs,
slender hips and short arms with fairly large, robust hands.
It
demonstrates that increased body size and neck lengthening were already evident
from the beginning of the evolutionary history of its lineage, says
Hechenleitner.
“Huayracursor drags
the origin of the long neck and larger body size towards the first
appearance of dinosaurs in the fossil record,” he says. “It’s fascinating to
think that giant animals up to 40 meters long and over 30 tonnes, like Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan,
are part of a lineage that began more than 100 million years earlier, with
bipedal forms just over a meter long and a mere 10 to 15 kilograms [in
weight].”
Source:
James Woodford 2025
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