Pre-dinosaur footprint Italian discovery


This video from the USA says about itself:

12 February 2014

Two new swamp monsters from the Triassic have been discovered in West Texas.

From ANSA news agency in Italy:

Dinosaur ancestors found’

Footprints of prehistoric creatures seen in Dolomites

24 March, 18:06

Trento – Some 150 tracks of creatures believed to be ancestors of dinosaurs have been found in an Italian pre-Alpine valley, the Trento Natural History Museum said Wednesday.

“The outline of some of the footprints is unique and suggests they may belong to a species of prehistoric reptile hitherto unknown to science,” palaeontologists from the museum said.

The tracks date back some 242 million years, or “immediately before the dinosaurs appeared,” they said.

Some of the prints may have been made by “a common ancestor of several dinosaurs as well as many of today’s crocodiles and lizards“.

The find was made in the Vallarsa valley, in the foothills of the Small Dolomites, in the dried-up and eroded beds of mountain streams.

“The way the rocky striations run leads us to believe there could well be more tracks still hidden underneath,” the scientists said.

Ornithosuchus longidens was the type species of an extinct genus of reptiles [which] lived during the late Triassic (about 220-200 million years ago): here.

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