Eoraptor

What it was like

Eoraptor was small and lightly built, with a long tail balancing a narrow skull full of small, varied teeth. It measured only about 1.7 meters (6 feet) long, roughly the size of a large dog, and ran on two long, slender legs.

Its jaws held a mix of tooth shapes, some curved and blade-like for catching small animals, others simpler and leaf-shaped, suggesting Eoraptor was probably an omnivore that ate both meat and plants.

Its world

Eoraptor lived from about 234 to 227 million years ago, in the Late Triassic, in what is now Argentina. Its fossils come from the Ischigualasto Formation, one of the richest sites for early dinosaurs anywhere in the world.

It lived alongside some of the earliest known dinosaurs, including Herrerasaurus, Panphagia, and Eodromaeus, at a time when dinosaurs were still a small part of a world dominated by other kinds of reptiles.

How it was found

Sereno and colleagues named Eoraptor in 1993. Only one fossil find has been reported for the genus, an almost complete skeleton that remains one of the best-preserved dinosaurs from this early part of the Triassic. Eoraptor is among the earliest and most primitive dinosaurs known, making it important for understanding how the first dinosaurs evolved.