New Mysterious Species Called ‘Microsaur’ Discovered By Paleontologists

There’s some new interesting news in the world of paleontology! New species have been discovered by palaeontologists called microsaur from a 308 million years old fossils.

As reported by AFP, the new species ‘microsaur’ is a small, lizard-like animal that roamed the Earth before dinosaurs made their appearance. Microsaurs lived during the Carboniferous Period, when the forebears of modern mammals and reptiles, called amniotes, first appeared.

"Microsaurs have recently become important in understanding the origins of amniotes," said co-author Arjan Mann, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. "A lot of these microsaurs have been thought to be either ancestor of amphibians or ancestors of reptiles." Researchers also made use of highly sensitive imaging techniques called scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to get a closer look at the fossil.

In other related news, researchers recently discovered a preserved dinosaur sitting atop a nest of its own eggs with fossilized babies inside, for the first time ever. The discovery has been published as a scientific paper in the journal Science Bulletin and the fossil consists of an incomplete skeleton of a large, presumably adult oviraptorid crouched in a bird-like brooding posture over a clutch of at least 24 eggs.

Another study revealed that 2.5 billion T. rex roamed the Earth over the course of a million years, not all at once, but with about 20,000 at any given time. Scientists made calculations based on body size, sexual maturity and the creatures' energy needs. They measured the amount of energy T. rex needed to stay alive and added their estimates.

Source: https://in.mashable.com/