Preparing for Chilesaurus

Team members at Everything Dinosaur have been busy making plans for the arrival of the Papo Chilesaurus dinosaur model.  The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted the production plans of Papo and Chilesaurus, although not planned to be one of the first new for 2020 model releases, it now looks like Chilesaurus will be coming into stock at Everything Dinosaur before the Stygimoloch and the Megaloceros figures.

The Chilesaurus Scale Drawing Commissioned by Everything Dinosaur

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

The Papo Chilesaurus Dinosaur Model

The Chilesaurus and the controversial Giganotosaurus are due to arrive first, with the Stygimoloch following a few weeks later. The new Papo Parasaurolophus and feathered Velociraptor colour variants are now scheduled for an early autumn release, although we do stress, that this itinerary is liable to change.

To view the range of Papo dinosaurs and prehistoric animal figures available from Everything Dinosaur: Papo Dinosaur and Prehistoric Animal Figures.

The First Jurassic Body Fossils Known from Chile

Although several dinosaur tracks and footprints that date from the Jurassic have been found in Chile, when the first fossils of Chilesaurus were discovered by a seven-year-old boy on the 4th of February 2004, these were the first dinosaur body fossils to have been found in Chile.

A Fossilised Jaw with Strange Square-shaped Tooth Tips

Picture credit: Dr Fernando Novas (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

This bizarre dinosaur, when first formally named and described (2015), was regarded as a tetanuran theropod.  The tetanurans are the largest clade of theropod dinosaurs and include all members of the Theropoda more closely related to modern birds than they are to Ceratosaurus.  Chilesaurus demonstrated a highly unusual combination of anatomical characteristics that could be interpreted within phylogenetic studies in numerous ways, depending on the data set used.

A Controversial Scientific Paper

Following a controversial scientific paper published in 2017 entitled  “A New Hypothesis of Dinosaur Relationships and Early Dinosaur Evolution”, written by Matthew Baron and David Norman (Cambridge University) along with Paul M. Barrett (London Natural History Museum), this little biped has taken up a prominent position within Dinosauria research.

A paper published a few months after the controversial publication that challenged the traditional view of dinosaur classification, suggested that Chilesaurus with its strange suite of features, was not a theropod at all.  It was suggested that it was the earliest diverging member of the Ornithischia.  It was proposed that Chilesaurus was a “transitional taxon”, bridging the morphological gap between the Theropoda and the Ornithischia.

This little, unassuming dinosaur might just prove to be one of the most significant dinosaur discoveries of the 21st century.

The Papo Chilesaurus Dinosaur Model

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