New lagerpetid from Madagascar

[DD1991]

A new paper is available online:

 

Kammerer, Christian F.; Nesbitt, Sterling J.; Flynn, John J.; Ranivoharimanana, Lovasoa; Wyss, André R., 2020. A tiny ornithodiran archosaur from the Triassic of Madagascar and the role of miniaturization in dinosaur and pterosaur ancestry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences doi:10.1073/pnas.1916631117. ISSN 0027-8424.

 

Until now, the fossil record of Triassic diapsids from Madagascar was pretty poor, and after the putative 'prosauropod' from the Isalo II unit (later named Azendohsaurus madagaskarensis) was found to be a non-archosauriform archosauromorph (like the Azendohsaurus type species), avemetatarsalians remained absent from the published Isalo II diapsid fossil record, but Kongonaphon, along with an unnamed silesaurid and an unnamed basal avemetatarsalian (reported at the SVP 2019 meeting), demonstrates that early bird-line archosaurs were widespread in Gondwana during the Anisian-Ladinian.

[Tidgy's Dad]

And the BBC's take on the matter :

 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53319635