Brazil: Scientists discover 70 million-year-old fossil of dinosaur species with no teeth

According to media reports, scientists from Brazil have found a new dinosaur species dubbed Berthasaura leopoldinae, with the scientists revealing that the fossil had no teeth. Their findings on the research were published in the British weekly journal 'Nature'. 

The late Thursday edition of the O Globo newspaper reported that the Director of the National Museum of Brazil Alexander Kellner stated that this newly discovered species had no set of teeth during its whole existence. 

The fossils were discovered in Parana, a state in southern Brazil. The dinosaur was reported to be 70-80 million years old, with a height of 80 centimetres (31 inches). The species was titled after Bertha Lutz, a Brazilian biologist and activist who died in the year 1976, and Maria Leopoldina, a 19th-century Brazilian monarch who was a supporter of science.

Dinosaur with no teeth is considered to be the most intact non-avian Theropod 

As per the nature journal, during a phylogenetic analysis, it has been stated that Berthasaura leopoldinae was placed as an early-divergent Noasauridae, which is basically a family of diverse theropod dinosaurs from the group Ceratosauria, which even belongs with the renowned Tyrannosaurus rex. 

This dinosaur species is considered to be the most intact non-avian theropod from the Brazilian Cretaceous, with the most extensive noasaurid axial series yet discovered. 

Furthermore, the journal reveals that the new clade has a number of unique osteological traits that are unusual in non-avian theropods even amongst South American ceratosaurs. These features include toothless jaws, a premaxilla (a pair of small cranial bones at the very tip of the upper jaw of many animals) with a cutting occlusal surface, and a rostral tip that is somewhat downturned. 

In addition to this, the nature journal even stated that Berthasaura leopoldinae did not eat the same foods as other ceratosaurs, the majority of which were carnivorous. Berthasaura, as the ontogenetically developed and matured specimens than Limusaurus inextricably dinosaur, may have been plant-eating species or omnivorous, validating an early evolutionary separation of noasaurids from the ceratosaurian bauplan by divergent feeding patterns.

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