Record rainfall eroded a fossil site in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sol and exposed a 233-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton. The almost perfectly preserved Herreasauridae is the oldest dinosaur fossil ever found.
Horrific flooding in the region has caused the deaths of 182 people. At the same time, more and more fossils are emerging. Paleontologists have to hurry to excavate them before they are damaged or swept away.
Even here, rain destroyed a leg and pelvis bone during the four hectic days it took to salvage the skeleton, said lead researcher Rodrigo Temp Muller. To prevent further damage, the team removed the large block of rock containing the dinosaur and took it back to the lab.
The Quarta Colonia Geopark, the site of the discovery, has yielded rich troves of fossils for two decades but nothing as old as this one. Dating back to the Triassic Era, it is likely the oldest dinosaur ever found. (Its age has yet to be peer-reviewed.) One Nyasasaurus fossil is said to be 240 million years old, but experts are divided on whether that number is accurate.
The oldest undisputed dinosaur fossils are 231 million years old — also from Herrerasauridae, one of the earliest families of dinosaurs. But this new find is a little older still.
In the next few months, the paleontologists hope to identify the exact species or determine whether it is an unknown type of dinosaur.
The meat-eater was an apex predator, approximately 2.5 meters long, and stood on two legs.
“We can’t say it had reached its maximum size,” says Muller. “Some individuals in this group could reach five or six meters.”
It was alive when Pangea still existed, and lived in what is now Brazil and Argentina.
