Estimated reading time: less than 1 minute
SAO PAULO — Brazil’s Geological Agency on Thursday announced a new species of dinosaur, a swift animal that lived in the desert during the early Cretaceous period.
The new species, called Farlowichnus rapidus, was a small carnivore, about 2 to 3 feet tall, about the same size as modern Seriema birds, researchers said. The discovery was published in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research.
“Due to the large distances between the footprints found, we can infer that these are very fast reptiles that ran through ancient sand dunes,” the geological agency said in a statement.
The Early Cretaceous period lasted from 100 million years ago to 145 million years ago.
The fossilized tracks, which scientists call dinosaur “trajectories,” were first discovered in the 1980s by Italian priest and paleontologist Giuseppe Leonardi in the city of Araraquara, in modern-day São Paulo state.
In 1984, Leonardi donated one of the footprint samples found in the so-called Botucatu Formation, a rock formation formed by an ancient dune desert, to Brazil’s Geosciences Museum.
Rafael Costa, a paleontologist at the museum, said the footprints were unlike any other known dinosaur footprints.