Hello and welcome to the Dinosaur Dispatch – the only podcast that believes dinosaurs still rule the earth.
On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about one of the oldest known dinosaurs, one who roamed South America in the Late Triassic Period over 230 million years ago – a large, agile carnivore called Herrarasaurus.
Herrarasaurus was a big dinosaur for it’s day – standing at fifteen feet long and seven feet tall – but small by standards set by it’s great-great-great-great-great grandchild, the mighty theropod Tyrannosaurus Rex, who stood about 40 feet long and 20 feet tall 160 million years later. Because this is the Triassic Period, we can expect non-dinosaurian creatures to drawf our humble young creature – such as the near-T-Rex sized Saurosuchus.
Herrarasaurus might not have the size of his Cretaceous cousins or his non-dino contemporaries, but it certainly had blood-curdling ferocity as indicated by it’s sliding jaw – which served to grasp struggling prey in a firm grip. Herrarasaurs used this not only to hunt and kill prey but to fight each other, as indicated by bite marks commonly present on Herrarasaurus skulls.
Discovered in 1959, Herrarasaurus was named after the person who spotted it’s bones, an Andean goatherd named Victorino Herrara, outside the city of San Juan. A complete skull was discovered in 1988 by Paul Sereno and lead researchers to conclude Herrarasaurus was, in fact, a key player in dinosaur evolution due it it’s protean classification.
Its position in the Dinosaur clade today is as a link between creatures as diverse as theropods, sauropods, and ornithiscians. Though there is some healthy debate on this concept, particularly whether they preceded theropods are were, in fact, early theropods, it is agreed that Herrarasaurus presents an important approximation of divergence – a subtle touchstone in the world’s evolutionary history.