The demise of Tyrannosaurus rex and most other dinosaurs some 65 million years ago may grab all the headlines. But paleontologists are equally concerned with puzzling out how these mighty beasts got their start. Who were their ancestors? Did they burst onto the scene, sweeping their older reptilian rivals before them, or take a quieter, more gradual route to world domination? On page 206, a team working in Argentina reports the discovery of a very early dinosaur—possibly a distant ancestor of T. rex—that lived about 230 million years ago, during what paleontologists call the dawn of the dinosaurs. The researchers say the new finds—two specimens that together make up a nearly complete skeleton of a diminutive, 1-meter-long dinosaur—and neighboring fossils show that dinosaurs didn't outcompete other reptiles, but rather gradually replaced them as their predecessors died out for other reasons. More controversially, the team says the fossils show that one of the most well-known early dinosaurs, Eoraptor, long considered an ancestor of meat eaters like T. rex, was actually an ancestor of gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs like Apatosaurus.
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