In Depth
Staurikosaurus may have been only a small theropod dinosaur, but it is also one of the earliest known confirmed dinosaurs. By the time of the Carnian, the first definitive theropods were roaming around South America and hunting other animals. At a little over two meters long, Staurikosaurus was probably a predator of smaller vertebrates like lizards, though it may have hunted for other smaller, possibly juvenile dinosaurs of genera like Saturnalia as well as scavenging the kills of other larger predators of the time. The long hind legs of Staurikosaurus indicate that it was a dinosaur that relied upon speed.
It is this very bipedal form that would become the ‘blueprint’ of dinosaurian predators for the next one hundred and eighty million years till the end of the Mesozoic, when large powerful predators like Tyrannosaurus and small exceptionally fast and agile predators like Velociraptor took the basic body design of Staurikosaurus to its extreme. This is not to say that Staurikosaurus itself was the ancestor of all later theropod genera, just that it is a member of a group of dinosaurs that either were or very closely related to those that were ancestral.
Further Reading
- A saurischian dinosaur from the Triassic of Brazil, E. H. Colbert - 1970. - Recovering missing data: estimating position and size of caudal vertebrae in Staurikosaurus pricei Colbert, 1970 - , O. N. Grillo & S. A. K. Azevedo - 2011.
