Laquintasaura

Here's another of those artists' impressions of ancient dinosaurs. This one is by Mark Witton and depicts Laquintasaura venezuelae (2014). It walked on two hind legs and was about a yard long from its snout to the tip of its tail and seems to have been a herd feeder on ferns and insects. Four have been found in the La Quinta geological formation in the Venezuelan Andes; hence its name. It lived 201 million years ago in the earliest Jurassic period, soon after the major extinction that ended the Triassic, and may be the grandaddy of later dinosaurs (CLICK).