The Oldest Jurassic Dinosaur

[Welsh Wizard]

Link to Plosone open access paper:

The Oldest Jurassic Dinosaur: A Basal Neotheropod from the Hettangian of Great Britain.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0145713

Nick

[The Goatlady]

Wow!

[Fossildude19]

Congratulations, Nick!

Well done!

Regards,

[RCFossils]

What a fantastic discovery!

I am glad to have had a front row seat for the excitement

Congratulations Nick!

[Mike Pocock]

Hi Nick

Congratulations and well done you must be immensely proud to have discovered and to donate Dracoraptor to the museum. I have spent the last hour and a half reading the link and have found it very well written and an excellent piece of work.

It brings back memory's of playing on that very beach with my brothers and sisters when I was a boy of 11 and was only interested in fishing. To think that Dracoraptor was watching me all the time.

Thank you for sharing your find with the world and next time I am in Cardiff visiting my Mum & Dad I will be paying a visit to the museum.

Regards

Mike

[Troodon]

Congratulations Nick, beautiful specimen.

[Welsh Wizard]

Thanks everyone.

It feels such a privilege to have found the dinosaur and then be allowed to name it. The icing on the cake was for the authors to add our name into the mix.

Dracoraptor hanigani. Named for the Welsh dragon.

Nick

[Killclaw]

It actually reminds me a lot of the triassic therapods like Eoraptor, shows how early it was.

What's the process with naming dinos these days, do you have to subcontract it out to a professor to do a scientific analysis and official description of it to publish in journals to officially become a new dinosaur?

[fossilized6s]

Fantastic, Nick! Thank you for sharing and updating us with this fantastic new chapter in history.

[jpc]

It actually reminds me a lot of the triassic therapods like Eoraptor, shows how early it was.

What's the process with naming dinos these days, do you have to subcontract it out to a professor to do a scientific analysis and official description of it to publish in journals to officially become a new dinosaur?

Subcontract is not quite the term. Basically whoever is describing the animal gets to name it... In this case the scientists subcontracted, you might say, to,our friends who found and donated it. That was really cool of them. Usually it is a professor, or other professional who does the writing of the description. It takes a lot of technical knowledge to do this. And it has to be published in a reputable journal. The fossil should be in an accepted repository, such as the National Welsh Museum. (I might have the name wrong there...)

Great job, team Wales. This thing is all over my facebook.