Boy Finds Strange New Vegetarian Dinosaur
A newly discovered vegetarian dinosaur was found in Chile by seven year old Diego Suarez while he and his geologist parents, Manuel Suarez and Rita de la Cruz were on a hike at the Aysen Toqui Formation near the Chilean Patagonia (www.geographia.com/chile/patagonia.htm). Now, Diego has bragging rights for life for his adventure because the small turkey sized dinosaur is going to be named after him, as it was dubbed the Chilesaurus Diegosuarezi.
Diego found pieces of rib bones and vertebrae and that began a larger search to discover more of this brand new species that appears to have lived in the area over 145 million years ago. This new vegetarian dinosaur is now found to be a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, even though Chilesaurus ate plants, and T-rex ate meat.…show more content… The Chilesaurus has a very small skull, a long neck, large legs and small arms like a T-rex, but its teeth shows that it was a plant eater, plus it has blunt finger like paws instead of claws like a meat eater.
Even so, it is being put into the species of dinosaurs called theropods, which also includes meat eaters like T-rex and Velociraptors. The pelvic region of this vegetarian dinosaur looks like those that show up in ornithischian dinosaurs.
All of these strange and different characteristics show that it was adapting to a specific kind of diet, which is why it took on features of several species in a process called evolutionary convergence (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution), making this new vegetarian dinosaur a fascinating adventure for the researchers who have been studying
