What did the very first dinosaur look like?

What did the first dinosaur actually look like? Most people imagine the first dinosaur as something like a miniature T. rex. Small, but still powerful. Still fearsome. Still recognisably dinosaur-like. But the real first dinosaurs were nothing like that. They were small, fast, lightly built animals living in a dangerous Triassic world dominated by other reptiles. Before dinosaurs ruled the Earth, they spent millions of years surviving in the margins while crurotarsans, early crocodile-line archosaurs, controlled many of the major ecosystems. In this video, we explore the origin of dinosaurs, from the aftermath of the Great Dying to the harsh world of the Triassic Period. We look at Nyasasaurus, one of the oldest possible dinosaurs ever found, and travel to Argentina’s Ischigualasto Formation, where animals like Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus reveal what the earliest dinosaurs may have looked like. The first dinosaurs were not giant monsters. They were small, bipedal, upright, fast-growing, hollow-boned opportunists. They were not the strongest animals in their ecosystems. They were not the largest predators. They were not guaranteed to take over. They survived. And when the end-Triassic extinction cleared the path, the biological advantages they had been building for millions of years suddenly mattered more than ever. From one small, fast, upright animal came 165 million years of dinosaur dominance. Sauropods. Theropods. Armoured dinosaurs. Horned dinosaurs. T. rex. Brachiosaurus. And every bird alive today. The first dinosaur would not have impressed you. But its descendants changed the history of life on Earth. Like and subscribe for more cinematic documentaries about dinosaurs, evolution, prehistoric life, extinct animals, natural history, and the science behind the creatures that shaped our planet. #dinosaurs #evolution #science