In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

A wonky beast about the size of a Labrador retriever with a long neck and lengthy tail may be the world's earliest known dinosaur, say researchers who analyzed fossilized bones discovered in Tanzania in the 1930s. 
  
 Now named Nyasasaurus parringtoni, the dinosaur would've walked a different Earth from today. It lived between 240 million and 245 million years ago when the planet's continents were still stitched together to form the landmass Pangaea. Tanzania would've been part of the southern end of Pangaea that also included Africa, South America, Antarctica and Australia. 
  
 It likely stood upright, measuring 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) in length, 3 feet (1 m) at the hip, and may have weighed between 45 and 135 pounds (20 to 60 kilograms). 
  
 "If the newly named Nyasasaurus parringtoni is not the earliest dinosaur, then it is the closest relative found so far," said lead researcher Sterling Nesbitt, a postdoctoral biology researcher at the University of Washington. 
  
 The findings, detailed online Dec. 5 in the journal Biology Letters, push the dinosaur lineage back 10 million to 15 million years than previously known, all the way into the Middle Triassic, which lasted from about 245 million to 228 million years ago. [See Photos of the Oldest Dinosaur Fossils] 
  
 Dating a dinosaur 
  
 The study is based on seemingly few bones — a humerus or upper arm bone and six vertebrae — though Nesbitt pointed out much of what we know about dinosaurs comes from similar number of fossils. Only a rare few dinosaurs are excavated with near-complete skeletons, a la museum centerpieces. 
  
 For their study, the researchers had to determine whether the bones indeed belonged to a dinosaur and how long ago the beast would've lived. 
  
 They dated the fossils based on the layer of rock in which it was found and the ages for the layers above and below it (over time layers of sediment accumulate on top of remains, making a vertical slice somewhat of a timeline into the past). 
  
 They also looked at the ages of rock layers with similar animal remains found across the globe. 
  
 As for whether the beast is a dinosaur, several clues say it is. For instance, dinosaurs grew quickly, and a cross-section of the humerus suggests bone tissue was laid down in a haphazard way, a telltale sign of rapid growth. 
  
 "We can tell from the bone tissues that Nyasasaurus had a lot of bone cells and blood vessels," said co-author Sarah Werning of the University of California, Berkeley, who did the bone analysis. "In living animals, we only see this many bone cells and blood vessels in animals that grow quickly, like some mammals or birds," Werning said in a statement. 
  
 The patterns in this bone scan indicate that the bone fibers are disorganized, like those of other early dinosaurs. Credit: ©Natural History Museum 
  
 The upper arm bone also sported a distinctively enlarged crest that would've served as a place of attachment for arm muscles. 
  
 "It's kind of your shoulder muscle or the equivalent in a dinosaur," Nesbitt told LiveScience, adding that "early dinosaurs are the only group to have this feature." 
  
 Vertebrate paleontologist and geologist Hans-Dieter Sues, who was not involved in the study, agrees with the dating and dinosaur tag placed on the remains. "I first saw the bones in the 1970s when the late Alan Charig (one of the co-authors) showed them to me," Sues, of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told LiveScience in an email. At that time none of his colleagues would accept that dinosaurs had appeared so early in geological history." 
  
 Sues added that additional, more complete remains are needed to confirm the relationships between Nyasasaurus and other dinosaurs. [6 Weird Species Discovered in Museums] 
  
 Answering a long-standing question 
  
 Paleontologists have for about 150 years suggested dinosaurs existed in the Middle Triassic, as the oldest dinosaur fossils fit into the Late Triassic period. However, that evidence has been fraught with uncertainty, with conclusions based on only dinosaurlike footprints or very fragmentary fossils. Footprints can be tricky to interpret, in this case, because other animals roaming Earth at the time would've made similar pedal prints. 
  
 "Previous to this find, all the oldest dinosaurs were all equally old from the same place in Argentina, and those sediments are about 230 million years [old]. So this pushes the dinosaur lineage or the closest relative to dinosaurs all the way back to the Middle Triassic," Nesbitt said during a telephone interview. "This is our best evidence of a Middle Triassic dinosaur." 
  
 In addition to pushing back the timeline for dinosaurs, Nesbitt says the study also reveals how dinosaurs emerged on Earth. Rather than waking up on the planet as the dominant beasts during their heydays in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, dinosaurs gradually ramped up to their reign. 
  
 "They were a unique group, but they didn't evolve and take over terrestrial ecosystems immediately," Nesbitt said. "Most of what we see in museums are from the Jurassic and Cretaceous when they did dominate — at their origins they were just a part of the radiation of Archosaurs," or the dominant land animals during the Triassic period that included dinosaurs, crocodiles and their relatives. 
  
 Nesbitt hopes the discovery will encourage other paleontologists digging in Middle Triassic rocks to keep a lookout for dinosaurs — fossils, that is. 
  
 Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+. ||||| Image caption Nyasasaurus parringtoni would have shared the land with silesaurs, identified as dinosaurs' closest relatives 
  
 Palaeontologists have found what is likely to be the oldest known dinosaur, filling in a yawning evolutionary gap. 
  
 A study in Biology Letters describes Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a new species from 10-15 million years before the previous earliest dinosaur specimens. 
  
 It walked on two legs, measured 2-3m in length with a large tail and weighed between 20 and 60kg. 
  
 The find suggests that many millions of years passed between dinosaurs' first members and their dominance on land. 
  
 "It fills a gap between what we previously knew to be the oldest dinosaurs and their other closest relatives," report co-author Paul Barrett, of the Natural History Museum in London, told BBC News. 
  
 Image caption The find shores up the idea that dinosaurs evolved on the southern parts of the supercontinent Pangaea 
  
 "There was this big gap in the fossil record where dinosaurs should've been present and this fossil neatly fills that gap." 
  
 However, the team behind the work has stopped short of definitively calling N parringtoni the earliest dinosaur, because the fossil skeletons used to define it were incomplete: one upper arm bone and six vertebrae. 
  
 The early evolution of dinosaurs is difficult to unpick, as a rich variety of reptiles were proliferating at the time - and some may even have independently evolved characteristics that are associated with dinosaurs. 
  
 The researchers, from the University of Washington and University of California Berkeley in the US and the Natural History Museum, re-examined a number of bones that were first collected from what is now Lake Malawi in southern Africa. 
  
 They saw a few features that are unambiguously those of dinosaurs - notably what is called an "elongated deltopectoral crest" that served as an anchor for strong pectoral muscles. 
  
 Lead author of the research Sterling Nesbitt, of the University of Washington Seattle, led a team that in 2010 reported the finding of dinosaurs' oldest relative, a member of a group called the silesaurs. 
  
 It now appears that those creatures shared the southern part of the supercontinent Pangaea - now South America, Africa, Antarctica and Australia - with N parringtoni. 
  
 "Those animals were the earliest of this group that led up toward dinosaurs," explained Dr Barrett. "Now this takes dinosaurs back to the right kind of time when those two groups would have split apart from each other." 
  
 As it closes that evolutionary gap, it shows that dinosaurs did not start out as dominant as they later became. 
  
 "We push the origin of dinosaurs further back in time to a time when lots of reptile groups are evolving," Dr Barrett said. 
  
 "Dinosaurs start out as a very insignificant group of reptiles - all relatively small animals, relatively rare in comparison with other reptile groups - and it's only a bit later in their history that they suddenly explode and take over as the dominant forms of life for nearly 100 million years." |||||
Scientists studying fossilized bones originally discovered in Tanzania in the 1930s may have revealed Earth's oldest known dinosaur, LiveScience reports. Nyasasaurus parringtoni lived between 240 million and 245 million years ago, some 10 million to 15 million years earlier than any other dinosaurs previously discovered. Researchers stopped short of calling the Nyasasaurus the earliest dinosaur, because just six vertebrae and an upper arm bone are available to study, but numerous clues indicate the beast is, in fact, a dinosaur. "There was this big gap in the fossil record where dinosaurs should've been present and this fossil neatly fills that gap," the study co-author tells the BBC. Paleontologists have long believed dinosaurs existed in the Middle Triassic period, the era from which this fossil dates. If it is indeed a dinosaur, this fossil shows that dinosaurs started out "as a very insignificant group of reptiles" before exploding into the dominant life form on Earth millions of years later, the co-author says. Nyasasaurus probably stood upright and was seven to 10 feet long.