National Geographic has a story about a new dinosaur discovery.  This new dinosaur, named Gnathovorax cabreirai, dates to about 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period.  It represents one of the earliest dinosaurs ever found.   This discovery was made near the town of Sao Joao do Polesine in southern Brazil.  Details can be found in a new paper in the journal PeerJ.

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL Paleontologist Rodrigo Muller was working in a nearby town in 2014 when his team members started sending him photos of the remarkable fossils.

The animal died in a flood plain, allowing sediment from a nearby river to cover its skeleton and create a stunningly intact fossil, which Muller and colleagues from the Federal University of Santa Maria and the University of São Paulo have now described in the journal Peer J.

The nearly perfect preservation of the dinosaur’s bones includes an undamaged brain case, an extremely rare find that allowed the team to reconstruct the dinosaur’s brain with CT scans. The structure reveals that this species was an active predator with good vision, focus, and balance, traits that helped it use its sharp, serrated teeth and long claws to capture its prey. (Also see a piece of fossilized brain tissue from a Cretaceous dinosaur.)

The fossil also bears visible scars at muscle insertion points, which will allow the team to eventually reconstruct its musculature to understand how it moved and got around