Jose Bonaparte was kind enough to send me a copy of his paper before it was published. (dinosaur exhibit suppliers)I was surprised at how similar our ideas about the pedigree of dinosaurs were—surprised because both of us had independently concluded that the orthodox view of the dinosaur ancestry was incorrect. According to orthodoxy, the two great dinosaur clans, the beaked dinosaurs and the meat-eaters, had evolved from quite different ancestors (brontosaurs supposedly evolved from early meat-eaters).
By 1920 this view had gained wide acceptance, although the issues were never debated thoroughly. Jose Bonaparte proposed that the truth was in fact closer to the older nineteenth-century idea that all dinosaurs were one natural group derived from the same ancestor. (realistic animatronic dinosaur)And, according to Bonaparte, Lagosuchus was that ancestor. I had already come to the same conclusion. In the dinosaurs’ family tree, Lagosuchus was the ultimate evolutionary grandparent, and, therefore, deserved the label of “first dinosaur.”
Could it be, then, that Lagosuchus was the ancestor of both dinosaurs and pterodactyls? (lifelike animatronic dinosaur)Taxonomically speaking, an exhilarating thought, because it would mean that the warm-blooded pter-odactyls evolved from a very primitive ancestor of the dinosaurs! If warm-blooded pterodactyls had evolved from early dinosaurs, perhaps the early dinosaurs themselves had already become warm-blooded. The case for the evolution of pterodactyls from Lagosuchus or from some very similar early dinosaur is fairly good. (big size dinosaur manufacturers)The shoulders and ankles of pterodactyls display the same unusual evolutionary modifications found in rabbitcrocs. Very primitive reptiles of all kinds had collarbones (clavicles) that braced the shoulder blades (humans retain this primitive bony strut, as do most lizards).
All dinosaurs, including Lagosuchus, either lost the collarbone entirely through evolution or had a drastically reduced one. And pterodactyls likewise were without this collarbone. In all primitive reptiles and true crocodiles a long bony strip, the inter-collarbone (interclavicle), lies on the chest between the shoulders. Lizards generally retain this inter-collarbone, but all dinosaurs lost it or reduced it to very narrow splint. And pterodactyls too lack the inter-collarbone.