(CNN)-Newly-covered fossils have allowed scientists to reveal the 240 million years old “dragon” in their entirety for the first time, the National Museum Scotland (NMS) said in a statement on Friday.
Five-meter-long reptiles in China were first recognized in 2003, but after studying five new samples for ten years, scientists were able to portray the entire creature, named dinosfelosaurus orientalis.
A fully expressed fossil, final to come to light, offered “a beautiful full sample below the tip of the nose”, offer, NMS, the protector of National Science in NMS. Nick Fraser and one of the researchers told CNN.
“It rotates in this type of eight of eight and … it reminds me of a Chinese dragon.”
The fossil helped to illuminate an international team of this mysterious creature and Scotland, German researchers, the USA and China published their findings at The Journal Earth and Environmental Science Transaction of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Lee Chun, Professor Lee Chun, was the first to expose fossils in 2003, a professor of the vertebral peliytology and the Palionthropology Institute in Beijing. He was visiting a small village in Guizhou province of southern China, when he saw a small vertebrae in a slab in Limustone, according to his colleague Fraser.
Local farmers then took Choon to a pig pen, where there were other pieces of that type of rock, and they began to find bone fragments and put them together to search for this new species, Fraser said.
Now, new fossils indicate that the creature had 32 vertebrae, making a very long neck, which possibly help the fish catch, although scientists are still uncertain about its accurate function.
“I am still surprised by the task of long neck,” said Fraser. “The only thing that I could come along is that they were feeding in water that had rocks, and perhaps cracks, among them. And they were to use their long neck to check and some of them to move to some cracks and perhaps hunt in this way. ,
Researchers stated in their paper that the fish is still preserved in the abdominal area of a fossil, indicating that it was well adapted in a sea environment, and its flipper organs strengthen that hypothesis, the researchers said in their paper.
He said that the long neck of dinosfelosaurus was similar to another ancient, and equally baffling, the sea reptiles were similar to tannistrophieas hydroids.
“As a pelionantologist, we use modern-day analogs to understand life in the past. For dinocephilosaurus and tannistrophieus, there is no modern day analog, “Fraser said, researchers can compare organisms such as itthiosaurus to their modern day counterparts such as tuna and dolphins.
“So we are still quite struggling, as we do with a lot of animals in Trices, because it is really a strange and amazing world of all kinds of bizarre animals that are doing things that are not animals today.”
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