Study Suggests Earliest Dinosaurs Originated in Equatorial Gondwana

New research points to the Amazon Basin and Sahara Desert as potential sites for uncovering Earth's first dinosaurs.

The earliest known dinosaur fossils date back 230 million years and have been found in Argentina, Brazil, and Zimbabwe, but gaps in the fossil record suggest dinosaurs evolved earlier in equatorial Gondwana.
Researchers propose that early dinosaurs thrived in hot, arid environments, such as the regions now comprising the Amazon Basin and Sahara Desert, based on climate modeling and evolutionary analysis.
The study highlights that the inaccessibility of these regions, due to dense vegetation, harsh climates, and limited exploration, may explain the lack of fossil discoveries there.
Early dinosaurs were small, bipedal, and omnivorous, contrasting sharply with their much larger descendants like Brontosaurus and Triceratops.
Paleontologists used evolutionary trees and geological modeling to suggest that silesaurids, close relatives of dinosaurs, may have been ancestors of ornithischian dinosaurs, filling gaps in the evolutionary record.