The newly-discovered fossil dates back to the Norian age of the Late Triassic epoch, some 206 million years ago.

It belongs to a previously unknown member of Massopoda, a large group of sauropodomorph dinosaurs that lived during the Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous epochs.

“Among the Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate groups, Sauropodomorpha represents one of the most successful dinosaurian clades, as it became one of the most abundant and dominant herbivore components of both the Late Triassic and the Jurassic continental paleoecosystems with an almost global distribution, spatially spanning from Antarctica to Greenland,” said Dr. Alessandro Lania from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and his colleagues from Switzerland.