A Dinosaur's Ancestor Walked Here ... 250 Million Years Ago

A dinosaur skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. 

This animal lived tens of millions of years after its recently discovered predecessor. 

Photo: arabani under a Creative Commons license.
250 million years ago, a dinosaur, walking on four legs and about the size of a house cat, walked through a quarry in what is now Poland. On Wednesday, the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B published the findings of its fossilized footprints, the New York Times reported. To be precise, the creature that roamed the Polish quarry did not fit all the criteria that define a dinosaur (a general term for a wide variety of species), but Stephen Brusatte, a Columbia University graduate student and the lead author of the journal article, says that it and the dinosaurs that evolved from it had much in common.

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