Hairy Museum of Natural History

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  The reconstructed skull of Panphagia (detail)
  Credit: Martinez & Alcober, 2009.

• New Dinosaur: Panphagia protos
• Name Means: First Everything-Eater
• Relations: Basal Sauropodomorph
• Holotype: PVSJ 874, partial skull and skeleton of an immature individual
• Location: Ischigualasto Provincial Park, Argentina
• Age: Carnian Triassic, ~228,300,000 years old
• Length: The juvenile holotype was about 1.3 meters (4.25 feet) long
• Info:
  Silhouette reconstruction of the skeleton of Panphagia protos
  From Martinez & Alcober, 2009.
• Some of the earliest known dinosaurs have come from the fabled Valley of the Moon in Ischigualasto Provincial Park, Argentina. Both Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus hail from the lower Upper Triassic rocks preserved there, and today researchers have added a new dinosaur to the Ischigualastoan roster. Panphagia protos was a smallish, slender, hollow-boned biped, at first glance not too terribly different from its contemporaries (particularly Eoraptor, which it shares some intriguing similarities with).
• Upon closer inspection, Panphagia shows characters that hint at much larger things to come. Its teeth are long and sharp, particularly near the front of the jaw, but also sport the coarse serrations seen in later plant-eaters. Its name, meaning “Everything Eater,” reflects Martinez and Alcober’s suggestion that it was an omnivore, descended from carnivorous ancestors but capable of supplementing its diet with plant matter as well. Several features of its teeth, skull, and skeleton ally it to the Sauropodomorpha, that great clade of long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs that would later give rise to familiar giants like Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus (as well as a whole panoply of less-well-known but equally fascinating megaherbivores).
• Little Panphagia appears to be the basal-most branch off the sauropodomorph family tree, providing researchers with new insight into the early evolution of dinosaurs, and clues to the origin of herbivory in some of the most famous extinct plant-eaters.
• Reference: Martinez, R. N., and Alcober, O. A., 2009. A Basal Sauropodomorph (Dinosauria: Saurischia) from the Ischigualasto Formation (Triassic, Carnian) and the Early Evolution of Sauropodomorpha. PLoS ONE. 4(2): e4397. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004397
• Further Reading:
  • Dracovenator: Before they were giants, a new fossil from the dawn of the age of dinosaurs
  • El PaleoFreak: Panphagia [Google Translation]
  • Clarín: Hallaron en San Juan al ancestro más antiguo de los dinosaurios gigantes [Google Translation]

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Triassic.