Triassic Dinosaur was A Vegetarian Dianosaur

A Dinosaur that lived in Australia 220 million years ago left behind traces that suggested it was a fierce predator. The new study of the tracks shows that the animal wasn’t a hefty meat eater, as scientists thought when they first analyzed the tracks more than 50 years ago. Rather, it was a smaller, long-necked vegetarian, the new study discovered.

Scientists previously estimated that the alleged carnivore that left the prints had legs measuring at least 2 meters tall at the hip and a body at least 20 feet long. At the time of their discovery, the prints were thought to represent the earliest evidence of big predatory Dinosaur. The new study shows that they found that the shape and proportions of the three-toed foot were unlike those of other theropod bipedal meat-eaters at the time, and were probably made by a smaller type of plant-eating Dinosaur called a prosauropod.

Prosauropods sometimes walked on four legs and sometimes walked on two, and they are thought to be ancestors of the giant long-necked and herbivorous sauropod Dinosaur, such as Diplodocus and Apatosaurus, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley.The scientist wrote in the study to date the traces represent the only evidence in Australia of Dinosaur from the Triassic period. Coal miners discovered the newly analyzed tracks in the roof of a mine in 1964, 699 feet below the surface, and the individual footprints measured between 16 and 17 inches in length.