Published on Wednesday, the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B say the first dinosaurs appeared about 250 million years ago. This is a big deal because bone fossils that had the full "criteria" to be a dinosaur were only dated to 230 million years ago. The earliest known relative of dinosaurs walked on four legs and left footprints in Poland. Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University said these new findings are, "the oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage of any type anywhere in the world." The new findings show that dinosaurs arose to fill ecological niches from an earlier and greater mass extinction. They have not found any bones in the rocks, but say the possibilities are "really exciting." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07dinosaurs.html?ref=science&pagewanted=print
I think that this article is interesting because there are possibilities of something before dinosaurs. It is interesting that they can figure out these fossils are from about 230-250 million years ago. I'm not sure if I believe everything they say because Dr. Nesbitt, a researcher at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington says it's hard to draw conclusions just from footprints, but they "put the best argument that anyone has ever put forth about early dinosaur tracks, and I think they're right." So saying that dinosaurs have an earlier ancestor isn't definite, it might just be an idea.
The idea of the dinosaurs having ancestors is pretty interesting, so I liked this article. I do agree that it would be hard to get one's hopes up for there being earlier specimens of dinosaurs since dating fossils from that far back would be difficult and possibly inaccurate.
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