Life reconstruction of Beesiiwo cooowuse with the pseudosuchian Heptasuchus clarki in the background representing the known fauna from the lower carbonate unit of the Popo Agie Formation, Wyoming, the United States. Image credit: Gabriel Ugueto.
SciNews has a story about a the discovery of a new species of Rhynchosaur. The animal, Beesiiwo cooowuse, lived around 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period. It was found in the Popo Agie Formation in central Wyoming, in the United States. Rhynchosaurs are archosaurs, which makes it a cousin to dinosaurs. This new species was described in a paper in the journal Diversity.
“The Late Triassic Carnian age is a critical interval in the diversification of many lineages that will play a prominent role throughout the Mesozoic (e.g., Mammaliaformes, Crocodylomorpha, Dinosauria),” said Adam Fitch, a paleontologist at Virginia Tech and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his colleagues.
“However, fossiliferous terrestrial strata recording this age are largely absent in the northern hemisphere.”
“One of the clades that has limited representation in this region is Hyperodapedontinae, a group of stem-archosaurian reptiles that had a broad distribution across southern Pangaea throughout the Carnian and very earliest Norian (i.e., no younger than 225.4 million years).”
