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Euparkeria , meaning "Parker's good animal", named in honor of W.K. Parker, was a small Africa
Africa

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km? including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area....
n reptile of the early Triassic
Triassic

The Triassic is a geologic period that extends from about 251 to 199 annum . As the first period of the Mesozoic Era, the Triassic follows the Permian and is followed by the Jurassic....
 period between 248-245 million years ago, close to the ancestry of the archosaur
Archosaur

Archosaurs are a group of diapsid reptiles represented by modern birds and crocodilians. This group also includes extinct non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and relatives of crocodiles....
s. It had a light, lean body, long tail, and a small skull with tiny, needle-like teeth. It fed on insects and any other small animals that it could find on the forest floor, and would periodically shed its teeth in order to keep them sharp.






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Euparkeria , meaning "Parker's good animal", named in honor of W.K. Parker, was a small Africa
Africa

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km? including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area....
n reptile of the early Triassic
Triassic

The Triassic is a geologic period that extends from about 251 to 199 annum . As the first period of the Mesozoic Era, the Triassic follows the Permian and is followed by the Jurassic....
 period between 248-245 million years ago, close to the ancestry of the archosaur
Archosaur

Archosaurs are a group of diapsid reptiles represented by modern birds and crocodilians. This group also includes extinct non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and relatives of crocodiles....
s. It had a light, lean body, long tail, and a small skull with tiny, needle-like teeth. It fed on insects and any other small animals that it could find on the forest floor, and would periodically shed its teeth in order to keep them sharp. The first fossils were found in South Africa in 1913, but better specimens were found in 1924.

Euparkeria was one of the smaller reptiles of its time, with the adults reaching the size of a large lizard (55 cm or 22 in). It lived in a world with many predators, so it had to be quick on its feet. It walked on four legs for most of the time, but if a quick getaway was needed, it could rise on to its hind legs and run at a very high speed. Euparkeria had relatively long hind legs, and may have been semi-bipedal, able to move using only its hind legs when running quickly (Carroll, 1988). This tendency towards bipedal locomotion makes Euparkeria one of the earliest reptiles to walk on two legs, a feature that would be retained in some dinosaur
Dinosaur

Dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrate animals of Landform ecosystems for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic Period until the end of the Cretaceous Period , when most of them became extinct in the Cretaceous?Tertiary extinction event....
s and early Crurotarsi
Crurotarsi

The Crurotarsi are a group of Archosauria, whose name was erected as a Cladistics#Cladistic classification by Paul Sereno in 1991 to supplant the old term Pseudosuchia....
. Another means of defence that Euparkeria possessed was a sharp claw on its thumb, which could have been used as a weapon in close combat.

Popular culture

Euparkeria was featured in the BBC television program Walking With Monsters
Walking with Monsters

Walking with Monsters is a three-part British documentary film series about life in the Paleozoic, bringing to life extinct arthropods, fish, amphibians, synapsids, and reptiles....
, incorrectly identifying it as the ancestor of all dinosaurs. Euparkeria was not the true ancestor of dinosaurs; however, it was related to the dinosauromorphs and Saltoposuchus
Saltoposuchus

Saltoposuchus is an extinct genus of small , long- tailed crocodylomorph reptile , from the Norian of Europe and North America. The name translated means "leaping crocodile"....
, a possible ancestor of the dinosaurs.

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