WASHINGTON — The surprising discovery of a fossil of a sharp-toothed beast that lurked more than 200 million years ago in what is now the western U.S. is filling a gap in dinosaur evolution.
The short snout and slanting front teeth of the find — Daemonosaurus chauliodus — had never before been seen in a Triassic-era dinosaur, said Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Sues and colleagues report the discovery in today’s edition of the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Sues said the discovery in Ghost Ranch, N.M., helps fill the evolutionary gap between the dinosaurs that lived in what is now Argentina and Brazil about 230 million years ago and the later theropods such as the famous Tyrannosaurus rex.
