FOSSILS that lay unexamined at the Natural History Museum for around 60 years have helped identify a “missing link” that forces scientists to rethink the early evolution of dinosaurs.

Fragments of a 245 million-year-old Teleocrater rhadinus studied by an expert at the London museum in the 1950s have shed new light on how the massive creatures developed before they dominated the earth.

Scientists from institutions including the the University of Birmingham and the Fields Museum in Chicago discovered that the creature, an early “cousin” of dinosaurs, was much less dinosaur-like than they were expecting.

Writing in the journal Nature, they found that while it had a long neck and tail, it also walked on all fours in style more like that of a modern monitor lizard.

Ken Angielczyk, the Field Museum’s associate curator of fossil mammals and one of the paper’s authors, said: “Teleocrater has unexpectedly crocodile-like features that are causing us to completely reassess what we thought about the earliest stages of dinosaur evolution."

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Boris Johnson has urged Russia to stop “acting as a lifeline for Assad’s murderous regime” in Syria and instead to “live up to its responsibilities as a global power”.

Russia’s veto of a UN resolution condemning a deadly chemical attack in Syria and pushing Bashar Assad’s regime to co-operate with an international inquiry put the country on the “wrong side” of the argument, the Foreign Secretary said.

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Nurses are starting to vote on whether they want to take industrial action in protest at a continuing cap on their pay.

Around 270,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing are being asked for their views on how to respond to a further below-inflation rise.

The poll will ask whether RCN members want to strike or take other forms of action, although a separate formal ballot would be required by law before any industrial action.

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