(Randall Irmis via AP)Plant-eating dinosaurs probably arrived in the Northern Hemisphere millions of years after their meat-eating cousins, a delay likely caused by climate change, a new study found.
A new way of calculating the dates of dinosaur fossils found in Greenland shows that the plant eaters, called sauropodomorphs, were about 215 million years old, according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
So far, scientists haven’t found any example of the earliest plant-eating dinosaur family in the Northern Hemisphere that’s more than 215 million years old.
The plant eaters “were late comers in the Northern Hemisphere,” said study lead author Dennis Kent, of Columbia University.
That highlighted the migration time gap, said several outside experts both in dinosaurs and and ancient climate.