Dinosaurs with teeth only as babies found in China
This is an image of Limusaurus. WASHINGTON - An analysis of fossils of 19 ceratosaurian theropod dinosaurs known as Limusaurus inextricabilis in China showed these extinct animals had teeth as babies that were gradually lost as they grew up, making them the first known reptile with such characteristic, researchers said Thursday. "We found a very rare, very interesting phenomenon in a ceratosaurian dinosaur whereby toothed jaws in juvenile individuals transition to a completely toothless beaked jaw in more mature individuals during development," said Shuo Wang of Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, whose study appeared in the U.S. journal Current Biology. "Initially, we believed that we found two different ceratosaurian dinosaurs from the Wucaiwan Area, one toothed and the other toothless, and we even started to describe them separately," Wang said. Limusaurus is part of the theropod group of dinosaurs, the evolutionary ancestors of birds, so the fossils also could help explain why birds have beaks, but no teeth, it added.
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