New dinosaur found in the wrong place, at the wrong time

A new dinosaur called Lingwulong shenqi or 'amazing dragon from Lingwu' has been discovered by an Anglo-Chinese team involving UCL. The announcement, published today , reports the surprising discovery of the new dinosaur which roamed the Ningxia Autonomous Region, northwest China, approximately 174 million years ago. This is in a place they were never thought to roam and 15 million years earlier than this type of dinosaur was thought to exist. Lingwulong is the earliest known example of a type of advanced sauropod dinosaur called a 'neosauropod' - one of the long-necked, gigantic herbivores that are the largest land animals known, including famous forms such as Brontosaurus and Diplodocus. Sauropods originated around 200 million years ago, but they only started to truly dominate terrestrial ecosystems by developing gigantic body size (up to 70 metric tonnes) and numerous new adaptations for obtaining and processing plant food. These giant neosauropod descendants were thought to originate around 160 million years ago, rapidly diversifying and spreading across the world during a time window perhaps as short as just 5 million years. "We were surprised to find a close relative of Diplodocus in East Asia 174 million years ago.