How to Grow a Dinosaur 2013 REU Project: Dinosaurs evolved in
the Triassic period of Earth history, about 230 million years
ago, and took over the terrestrial environment soon after. Even
though dinosaurs are a unique group, they inherited many of
their characteristics from their closest relatives. Some of
these characters include a fast growth rate and new sites of
muscle attachments on bones. Yet, the order of the appearance of
these characters among early dinosaurs and their closest
relatives and the relationships of the appearance of the muscle
scars and individual age (ontogeny) are not clear. To understand
the growth of an animal, different growth stages of a single
species are needed, but such growth series rare in the fossil
record. Fortunately, researchers at the Field Museum have
recently collected hundreds of bones of different sized
individuals of close dinosaur relative named Asilisaurus kongwe,
from the Middle Triassic of Tanzania in Africa. The bones of
Asilisaurus will help us understand the r