The discovery provides new elements to the theory of dinosaur dispersion, suggesting that ornithischians had already begun to colonize regions further north, such as East Asia, at a time when ...

Such features "are lost in later ornithischians," Radermacher said. This tells us that early members of this group "were doing something very different with their bodies," he added.

Ornithischians are bird-hipped dinosaurs and include a group featuring duck-billed dinosaurs, frilled dinosaurs like the Triceratops, and armored dinosaurs like the Ankylosaurs.

“So, the very earliest ornithischians were, technically, saurischian,” said Norman. “From a taxonomic perspective, classifying silesaurs as early ornithischians seems counterintuitive.

If theropods and ornithischians come from one common ancestor, it means feathers only evolved once, instead of evolving separately in the two major branches of the dino tree.

If that’s true, Brusatte said, it will add as many as 7 million to 10 million years to the history of ornithischians. It also suggests that dinosaurs were much more common and widespread earlier ...

The theropods and ornithischians that escaped the effects of the Jenkyns event may have had a key adaptation to cooler climes; many dinosaurs from these groups are now thought to have been feathered.

Paleontologists had found two different ornithischians with peculiar body coverings before. In 2002 Gerald Mayr and colleagues announced bristle-like structures jutting from the tail of ...

The researchers then fed the AI upward of 1,500 dinosaur footprints related to theropods and ornithischians—the two dinosaurs associated with the 93-million-year-old conundrum.

So for the new study, researchers at the University of Bristol investigated the eating habits of 11 early species from the three main lineages – ornithischians, sauropodomorphs and theropods.