We all know about the dinosaurs, but what came before? The Venetoraptor Gassenae family of creatures isn’t well understood, but experts say that this find could change all of that.
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00:00 These are the fossils recently found in Brazil.
00:06 And while they're not that large or impressive as far as dinosaur bones go, their scientific
00:10 importance is gargantuan.
00:12 That's because they belong to what's called Venatoraptor gassini, which isn't a dinosaur
00:16 at all.
00:17 Venatoraptors are actually part of a phylum of creatures that came before the dinosaurs.
00:21 And pterosaurs, called Lagerpetid archosaurs, they lived on Earth in the late Triassic period.
00:26 And they're giving scientists a look at what the dinosaurs' ancestors looked like.
00:30 This is Rodrigo Temp-Muller, a paleontologist with the Santa Maria Federal University in
00:35 Brazil.
00:36 He says that very little is known about this creature, which lived some 230 million years
00:40 ago, and that this discovery has finally revealed what their faces likely looked like.
00:45 But the paleontologist adding that the degree and morphological variation of these precursors
00:49 of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs was much greater than they had imagined.
00:53 However, that very morphology is showing a clear connection to the morphology of the
00:57 pterosaur family specifically.
00:59 The creature was only around 3.2 feet long.
01:01 However, paleontologists believe it will be key in better understanding prehistoric species
01:07 and their evolution.
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