Triassic fossil reveals a beaked, bipedal reptile that looked like an ostrich dinosaur

The Late Triassic was full of animals that look almost familiar, right up until you place them on the evolutionary tree. One of the newest examples is Labrujasuchus expectatus, a lightly built, two-legged reptile with tiny forelimbs and a toothless beak, an animal that would not have looked out of place beside the ostrich-like dinosaurs of a much later age.

Triassic fossil reveals a beaked, bipedal reptile that looked like an ostrich dinosaur. The Late Triassic was full of animals that look almost familiar, right up until you place them on the evolutionary tree. One of the newest examples is Labrujasuchus expectatus, a lightly built, two-legged reptile with tiny forelimbs and a toothless beak, an animal that would not have looked out of place beside the ostrich-like dinosaurs of a much later age. It was not a dinosaur. Instead, Labrujasuchus belonged to the crocodile line of archosaurs, the branch that eventually gave rise to crocodilians. That makes it one of the stranger cases yet of Triassic convergence, when unrelated reptiles repeatedly stumbled into body plans that later became more familiar in dinosaurs, birds, and modern animals. Described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, t...