DinoFest 2019 Speaker: Sterling Nesbitt
Becoming a Dinosaur: New Fossils of Dinosaur Relatives Reshapes our Ideas of How We Identify Dinosaurs by Sterling Nesbitt, Assistant Professor in Paleobiology, Virginia Tech University
For over a century, Mesozoic dinosaurs were easy to identify because they contain a number unique skeletal characteristics. New fossils of early dinosaurs and their close relatives from the Triassic Period show that many of the previously ‘unique’ dinosaur characteristics are either absent or also found in their closest relatives. This demonstrates that dinosaurs inherited almost all of their seemingly unique characteristics from their close relatives and that, dinosaurs only became distinctive as a result of the extinction of their close relatives at the end of the Triassic.