The first dinosaur fossils belonged to a plant-eating titanosaur and a sharp-toothed theropod, scientists reported Dec. 26 in the journal PLOS One. The first confirmed fossils were found in Saudi Arabia. Dinosaur fossils have been a rare find in the Arabian Peninsula; with previous finds mainly including teeth and bone fragments of similar species from Jordan, Oman and Lebanon, researchers report. “This discovery is important not only because of where the remains were found, but also because of the fact that we can actually identify them,” Benjamin Kear, lead study author, said in a statement. “These are the first taxonomically recognizable dinosaurs reported from the Arabian Peninsula,” said Kear, a paleobiologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.The 72-million-year-old first dinosaur fossils were discovered in the Adaffa formation, a pile of sandstone and conglomerates (pebble-rich rocks) deposited by streams and rivers during the Late Cretaceous Period per Fox News. At that point in time, Arabia had not yet separated from Africa and was bounded on the east by the Tethys Ocean. When the bones were buried in the sand, parts of Arabia were underwater. Read more at http://americanlivewire.com/first-dinosaur-fossils-found-saudi-arabia/
