Finding tiny dinosaurs in Germany

A newly unearthed small-bodied dinosaur in northern Germany.

Tiny dinosaur model.( Photo: BBC )

The creature of the sauropod group - the 4-foot and the tallest ancient herbivorous dinosaur in the dinosaur world

But with only a few meters in length, this animal is much smaller than its fellow brothers. The team thinks the Jurassic species has evolved into a small shape to accommodate the scarcity of food on the island.

Martin Sander, at the University of Bonn and colleagues studied the traces of the 11 sauropods found at the quarry in Oker, Lower Saxony.

With a total body length of 1.7 to 6.2 m, the group initially assumed that these dinosaurs were puberty. But when examining the fossils thoroughly, they found them to be tiny creatures.

The group was named Europasaurus holgeri - Holger reptile of Europe. The name is to remember Holger Luedtke, a paleontologist who found the first bone in 1998.

In height, E. holgeri stands tall to the horse's shoulders, while other sauropods are larger than buses, tens of meters long and weigh more than 100 tons.

Biological fossils are found in the late Jurassic rock range (150 million years old). At this time, most of the center of Europe was submerged. Sander believes that the dinosaurs lived on one of the large islands around the Lower Saxony basin.

" Such islands cannot provide enough support for giant sauropods, " Sander said.

MT