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 show that the plant eaters, called sauropodomorphs, were about 215 million years old, instead of as much as 228 million years old, as previously thought, according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That changes how scientists think about dinosaur migration. The earliest dinosaurs all seemed to first develop in what’s now South America about 230 million years ago or longer.