230-million-year-old dinosaur discovered in Argentina

At an altitude of more than 3,000 meters, in an inhospitable landscape in the province of La Rioja, in northern Argentina, a group of paleontologists has discovered a nearly complete skeleton of a dinosaur that lived around 230 million years ago. This makes it one of the oldest representatives of this now-extinct group of animals in the world.

Named Huayracursor jaguensis, the dinosaur was described in Nature on October 15. “The name Huayracursor combines the Quechua term huayra ('wind') and cursor (Latin for 'runner' or 'walker'), referring to the climatic conditions of the area and the town of Jagüé, close to the discovery site,” reports the Argentinian newspaper La Nación.

Huayracursor jaguensis belongs to the sauropodomorph lineage, a group of herbivorous dinosaurs that were the ancestors of long-necked giants. The specimen found was about 2 meters long and probably weighed 18 kilograms. “This discovery provides one of the earliest evidences of increased body mass and neck elongation in early sauropodomorphs,” the study authors write.

Near the bones of Huayracursor jaguensis, paleontologists found other fossils, including those of mammals that lived at the time, which allowed them to