An article published in the journal “Science Advances” describes the analysis of fossils of Atopodentatus unicus, a reptile that lived in the mid-Triassic period, between 247 and 242 million years ago. Recent discoveries of two fossil skulls forced palaeontologists to rethink the idea they had made of this animal and now they consider it the most ancient herbivore marine reptile discovered so far.

An article published in the journal “PLoS ONE journal” describes the analysis of the fossil skull of a sauropod dinosaur discovered in Patagonia, Argentina. Called Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, it was a titanosaur, the group the largest dinosaurs ever lived belonged to. A team led by Rubén Martínez of the Laboratorio de Paleovertebrados of the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB) discovered that it had developed senses.

An article published in the journal “Journal of Biogeography” describes a research that led to recreate the possible outline of the migrations of dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era and concluded that there was particularly a very important one from today’s Europe in the Cretaceous, between 146 and 100 million years ago. These results were obtained by applying for the first time network theory to paleontology.

An article published in the journal “Current Biology” describes a research on the reasons for the survival of primitive birds the great extinction that struck the dinosaurs. According to a team led by Derek Larson, a paleontologist at the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada, at the end of the Cretaceous the conditions became such that winged dinosaurs and carnivorous birds became extinct while the ancestors of modern birds that ate seeds survived.