* Astronomy

Reptile fossils hint at wide diversity of dinosaur ancestors

Fossils of a four-legged, meat-eating reptile are helping paint a more complicated picture of the ancestry of dinosaurs than scientists had understood.
The creature was not a direct ancestor, but was more like a cousin. It lived about 245 million years ago, roughly 10 million years before dinosaurs appeared. It's the oldest known member of an evolutionary branch of animals that eventually led to dinosaurs and pterosaurs, living relatively soon after that branch split away from the ancestry of crocodiles.
Researchers who found fossils in Tanzania in 2015 describe the creature in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature.
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