New "Buck-Toothed Evil Spirit" Dinosaur Found

Primitive predator bridges gap in fossil record, experts say.

An artist's rendering of the new dinosaur species Daemonosaurus chauliodus.


Found at New Mexico's Ghost Ranch fossil site, the primitive dinosaur lived about 205 million years ago. (Related pictures: "'Nasty' Little Predator From Dinosaur Dawn Found.")


"It has a deep, short snout and these monstrous front teeth. That's a kind of skull structure for a predatory dinosaur that's really unexpected for this early point in time," Sues said.

These features helped earn the new dinosaur the name Daemonosaurus chauliodus, or "buck-toothed evil spirit" in Greek.

Earliest Dinosaurs Were Survivors

The oldest known dinosaurs lived in what's now South America during the late Triassic Period, some 230 million years ago. This group included early versions of two-legged predators known as theropods.


"The idea," Sues said, "was that there was this early diversification of dinosaurs ... but then they went extinct, and more advanced predators took over during the late Triassic and diversified later at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, when we know that dinosaur predators greatly diversified and increased a lot in size."

Now the Daemonosaurus find links the two dinosaur groups.

"Our new dinosaur, along with another one that was found a few years ago ... at the same site, indicates that those basal dinosaurs already included a number of early theropods, and that they survived all the way through the Triassic to nearly the beginning of the Jurassic Period."

Bucktooth Dino Bridges Evolutionary Gap


But the fossils show that the dinosaur has several features—including cavities in its vertebrae linked to the respiratory system—that bridge the evolutionary gap between the earliest dinosaurs and the neotheropods, the next group of predatory dinosaurs to evolve.



"The new find gives further evidence that the earliest radiation of dinosaurs did have a wider distribution, and it is due to the incompleteness of the fossil record that we'd found them only in Argentina and Brazil."

The new dinosaur is described in the April 13 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.