A newly discovered dinosaur, the Lingwulong shenqi has been uncovered in the north of the country and is estimated to be about 174 million years old. It has been classified as a sauropod, the long-necked dinosaurs we have come to love in such films as Jurassic park ( Brachiosaurus )
It is thought, around this time East Asia was to have split from the supercontinent Pangaea. But this new discovery may well be evidence that that was not the case. Neosauropods which is a subgroup of the Sauropods, which included brontosaurus, diplodocus and brachiosaurus, the new dinosaur appeared exactly where it shouldn’t have been uncovered, in northern China, which is 15 million years earlier than any other known dinosaurs from this group.
Dr Philip Mannion from Imperial College London, an author on the study, described the discovery as “doubly unexpected.
“Not only is it the oldest member [of this group], but it’s the first ever from Asia. For a long time it was thought that neosauropods didn’t get into Asia during the Jurassic,”
