New research on dinosaur footprints discovered in Poland have led scientists to think that dinosaurs were walking our earth at least nine million years earlier than previously thought. The Polish dinosaur footprints date from the early Triassic period and are around 250 million years old. The dinosaur that created the footprints has been dubbed Prorotodactylus and they evolved not long after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which saw many species disappear.
These early dinosaurs were only around the size of a modern domestic cat and walked on four legs. These diminutive dinosaurs would have been very rare compared to the numerous reptile species of the time and how dinosaur species evolved and spread over the globe is still not fully understood.
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