Livescience has a story about the discovery of the "First Giant" dinosaur in Argentina. This, the earliest sauropodomorph, lived about 215 million years ago in the Triassic period. Ingentia prima, which means "first giant in Latin - weighted about 11 tons and was 32 feed long. All the details were published in a paper in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
"This new discovery was a pleasant surprise, and I think it's one of the most important dinosaur finds of the last few years," Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science. "These new fossils force us to rethink when, and how, dinosaurs got so enormous."
Paleontologists used to think that the first giant dinosaurs evolved during the early Jurassic period, which lasted from 199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago, after supervolcanoes erupting from the fragmenting cracks of the supercontinent Pangea caused a mass extinction at the end of the Triassic, Brusatte said.
"But this discovery changes that simple story," he said. I. primaand other lessemsaurids (large dinosaurs from the late Triassic that all belong to the sauropod group) that the researchers studied "tell us that at least some dinosaurs were able to attain huge sizes during the latest part of the Triassic, before the extinction," Brusatte said.
