In a paper published recently in Scientific Reports, scientists from IIT Roorkee have characterised dinosaur fossils from the Middle Jurassic period, found in the Thar desert near the Jaisalmer Basin by the Geological Survey of India. They discovered that they had uncovered remains of a sauropod dinosaur, which is the same clade as the long-necked herbivores in Jurassic Park – only these happened to be the oldest known fossils of this particular kind of sauropod.
Belonging to the family Dicraeosauridae and from the superfamily Diplodocoidea, these fossils are the first dicraeosaurid sauropods to have been found in India. And at 167 million years old, they are the oldest known diplodocoid fossils in the world. The scientists named the dinosaur Tharosaurus indicus, with Tharo deriving from the Thar desert; saurus from the Greek ‘sauros’, or lizard; and indicus from its Indian origin. The fossils were found by Triparna Ghosh, Pragya Pandey, and Krishna Kumar from the Geological Survey of India.
