A UQ geologist has helped uncover evidence of live birth among a species of dinosaur, changing the way scientists look at dinosaur evolution.
UQ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences Head Professor Jonathan Aitchison was part of a team that discovered a remarkable 250 million-year-old fossil in China that shows an embryo inside a mother.
Professor Aitchison said the Dinocephalosaurus fossil was an archosauromorph, a long-necked marine animal and distant relative of the crocodile, that flourished in the shallow seas of South China in the Middle Triassic Period.
The creature was a fish-eater, snaking its long neck from side to side to snatch its prey. Its fossil was one of many astonishingly well-preserved specimens from Luoping Biota sites in south-western China.