7-Year Old Discovered T Rex's Vegetarian Cousin in Chile

First it was news of a five-year old in Texas and now a seven-year old in Chile has reportedly discovered the fossil of a previously unknown species of dinosaurs, giving paleontologists a run for their money.

Diego Suarez, who was seven in 2004, was playing in the Andes when his geologist parents were studying rocks. Suarez stumbled up on a fossilized bone that his parents knew was a rare find. When the parents teamed up with field experts and explored the area they found several bones and almost four nearly complete skeletons of the dinosaur that was named after Diego - Chilesaurus diegosuarezi.

Though Chilesaurus was classified a theropod, a family of dinosaurs including the fearsome Tyrannosaurus, experts who analyzed its skull concluded it was vegetarian. The teeth of Chilesaurus were found to be flat unlike the spiky teeth of meat eating dinosaurs. It is said to have lived 145 million years ago.

The authors who made the find and described it in the journal Nature, called the dinosaur bizarre because its body parts were unlike dinosaurs of its time. The skeletons revealed that the pelvic girdle was more primitive than other members of its family. The skeletons' find also questions existing timeline of theropod evolution and the shift from carnivorism to herbivorism as Chilesaurus lived at a time when herbivores of its family were not known to exist.

"Theropod dinosaurs were the dominant predators in most Mesozoic era terrestrial ecosystems. Early theropod evolution is currently interpreted as the diversification of various carnivorous and cursorial taxa, whereas the acquisition of herbivorism, together with the secondary loss of cursorial adaptations, occurred much later among advanced coelurosaurian theropods. A new, bizarre herbivorous basal tetanuran from the Upper Jurassic of Chile challenges this conception," researchers wrote.