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Eoraptor facts for kids

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Eoraptor
Temporal range: Upper Triassic 231.4 mya
Eoraptor Japan.jpg
Scientific classification
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Eoraptor

Eoraptor is one of the earliest known saurischian dinosaurs. It was a very small omnivore or carnivore which lived at the start of the Upper Triassic, about 231.4 million years ago (mya). It is the only one of the early dinosaurs which can be exactly dated by a layer of volcanic ash close beneath the fossil.

Eoraptor was a small, lightly-built dinosaur that walked on two long legs. It was about 3 feet long (1 m); it had light, hollow bones, a long head with dozens of small, sharp teeth, and five fingers on its grasping hands (two of the fingers on each hand were very small).

The fossil was found in the Ischigualasto Formation in the Argentine. This contains some of the oldest known dinosaur remains. They are of top quality, number and importance. It is the only place in the world where nearly all of the Triassic is represented in an undisturbed sequence of strata. What is now badlands was then a volcanically active floodplain dominated by rivers, with a strongly seasonal rainfall.

Rhynchosaurs and cynodonts are by far the most common among the tetrapod fossils in the park. Dinosaurs make up only 6% of the findings, but these include early samples of the two major lineages of dinosaurs (ornithischians and saurischians). The carnivorous Herrerasaurus is the most numerous of these dinosaur fossils.

Teeth

The teeth of Eoraptor are of two types. There are serrated, recurved teeth in the maxillae (upper jaws), like the teeth of theropods, and leaf-shaped teeth in the dentary (lower jaw), like the teeth of basal sauropodomorphs.

Cladogram

Below is a cladogram based on the phylogenetic analysis conducted by Sues et al. in 2011, showing the relationships of Eoraptor:

Theropoda 
 Herrerasauridae 

Staurikosaurus




Herrerasaurus



Chindesaurus






Eoraptor




Daemonosaurus




Tawa


 Neotheropoda 
 Coelophysidae 

Megapnosaurus



Coelophysis





Liliensternus




Zupaysaurus




Cryolophosaurus




Dilophosaurus



Jurassic theropods












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See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Eoraptor lunensis para niños

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