Fossils Show Dinosaurs Living Side By Side With Ancestors

It is one thing to live in the same house as your parents long after you should be moving out, but it seems that dinosaurs took living with other generations to the next level by sharing space with lagerpetids -- animals that are thought to have lived long before dinosaurs were even thought to have walked the earth.

The journal Current Biology showed that these ancient animals and their ancestors may have coexisted for a while. This revelation, according to The Los Angeles Times, could even shed light on their differences when they emerged, evolved and spread as dinosaurs.

Fossils of two small dinosaurs and tow lagerpetids were discovered in Southern Brazil, in a town called São João do Polêsine, including a partial lagerpetid and a partial sauropodomorph (a group of dinoasaurs including sauropods like Apatosaurus).

This showed that dinosaurs and lagerpetids lived together relatively late -- around the end of the Triassic age 228 million to 201 million years ago. However, the new specimen found were taken from one of the world's oldest rocks with dinosaur fossils, which stretched to up to 237 million years ago.

This proves that dinosaurs and their precursors actually lived alongside each other, effectively proving that the rise of the dinosaurs was actually gradual, and not a fast overtaking of animal over time as scientists initially thought, Max Langer of Brazil's Universidade de São Paulo told Phys.org.

In fact, the two groups of animals probably even shared the Earth for as long as 30 million years, Max Cardoso Langer, co-author of the study and a paleontologist from the University of Sao Paulo noted. "We previously thought that once dinosaurs appeared, they sort of out-competed and drove the other animals like lagerpetids to extinction, and now we know that they were living side by side."