Baby dinosaurs were 'little adults'

[Still Waters]

Long neck, small head and a live weight of several tons—with this description you could have tracked down the Plateosaurus in Central Europe about 220 million years ago.

Paleontologists at the University of Bonn have now described for the first time an almost complete skeleton of a juvenile Plateosaurus and discovered that it looked very similar to its parents even at a young age. The fact that Plateosaurus showed a largely fully developed morphology at an early age could have important implications for how the young animals lived and moved around.

The young Plateosaurus, nicknamed "Fabian," was discovered in 2015 at the Frick fossil site in Switzerland and is exhibited in the local dinosaur museum. The study was published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-baby-dinosaurs-adults.html