Innovative online Birmingham courses produce first graduates

A new species of ancient reptile has been described by scientists at the University of Birmingham, filling a critical gap in the fossil record of dinosaur cousins and suggesting that some features thought to characterise dinosaurs evolved much earlier than previously thought. Described in a paper published today in Nature, the carnivorous reptile, Teleocrater rhadinus, was approximately 7-10 feet in length, had a long neck and tail, and walked on four crocodile-like legs. It roamed the Earth during the Triassic Period more than 245 million years ago - pre-dating the first true dinosaurs by around ten million years - and appears in the fossil record just after a large group of reptiles, known as archosaurs, split into a bird branch (leading to dinosaurs and eventually birds) and a crocodile branch (eventually leading to today's alligators and crocodiles). Teleocrater and its kin are the earliest known members of the bird branch of the archosaurs. The discovery overturns widely-held preconceptions by palaeontologists about the morphology of early dinosaur relatives, with many scientists anticipating that such creatures would be smaller, bipedal and more 'dinosaur-like'. 'Teleocrater fundamentally challenges our models of what the close relatives of dinosaurs would have looked like,' says Professor Richard Butler from the University of Birmingham. 'Dinosaurs were amazingly successful animals.