Going though some old files I realised that I’ve still not got round to showing off everything from the Dinosaur Expo in Tokyo last year! There’s still a handful of exhibits with are worth putting up on here and chief among them is this pair of very basal dinosaurs Eoraptor (above) and Eodromaeus (below).
I did once see a cast of the Eoraptor holotype briefly and it did look rather flattened, though mostly complete, so I assume the mount above is a fair representation, though I also assume it’s mostly sculpted rather than cast. Hard to tell really from a distance and this was one of the things I didn’t have time to examine in detail so I’m afraid I don’t know. As for Eodromaeus, a look through my files tells me I don’t have a copy of the paper with me on my laptop but a quick google suggests it’s mostly complete and preserved in a pretty good condition.
As usual for things this close to the base of a major radiation, the exact phylogenetic status of these animals is not entirely certain. Described as a basal theropod, Eoraptor has since been recovered as a basal sauropodomorph and I don’t think it would be a major surprise if Eodromaeus ever moved a few nodes around the tree at some point.
I assume that there must be species which are saurischians from before the theropod-sauropodomorph separation and that they would look very similar to generic basal theropods. I guess that there is always going to be debate about which side of a(n arbitrary) line an animal close to that line would fall. Need…more…data.
Yeah that’s pretty much it. The closer you get to a split, the harder it will be to tell things apart (as the key characters won’t have appeared or be in the same form) hence why things tend to jump around a bit, plus of course we’re going back 200+ million years looking for relatively small fossils so the remains are few and far between.