Zimbabwean scientists announced on Thursday the discovery of the remains of Africa’s oldest dinosaur, which inhabited Earth about 230 million years ago.
Dubbed Mbiresaurus raathi, the dinosaur was around a meter tall, had a long tail and weighed up to 30kg, according to the international team of paleontologists who made the discovery.
“It ran on two legs and had a fairly small head,” Christopher Griffin, the scientist who unearthed the first bone, told AFP on Thursday.
a sauropodomorph
It is probably an omnivore that fed on plants, small animals and insects. The dinosaur belongs to the sauropodomorpha species, the same lineage that would later include the giant long-necked dinosaurs, said Griffin, a 31-year-old researcher at Yale University.
The skeleton was found during two expeditions in 2017 and 2019 by a team of researchers from Zimbabwe, Zambia and the United States.
“I dug up the entire femur and knew then that it was a dinosaur and that it had the oldest known dinosaur fossil from Africa,” said Griffin, who was then a doctoral student at Virginia Tech University.
His team’s findings were first published in the journal Nature Wednesday. Previously, dinosaur remains from the same era had only been found in South America and India.
Dinosaur ‘remarkably similar’ to others found in South America
Paleontologists chose Zimbabwe to dig after calculating that when all the continents were connected into a single landmass known as Pangea, it was at roughly the same latitude as previous discoveries made in North America.
“Mbiresaurus raathi is remarkably similar to some dinosaurs of the same age found in Brazil and Argentina, reinforcing the fact that South America and Africa were part of one continuous landmass,” said Max Langer of the University of São Paulo. Paul in Brazil.
The dinosaur is named after the Mbire district in northeast Zimbabwe, where the skeleton was found, and paleontologist Michael Raath, who was the first to report fossils from this area.
An almost complete skeleton.
Other specimens have been found in this area, all of which have been deposited at the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe in the country’s second largest city, Bulawayo.
“The discovery of Mbiresaurus is exciting and special for Zimbabwe and the entire paleontological field,” said museum curator Michel Zondo.
“The fact that the Mbiresaurus skeleton is almost complete makes it a perfect reference material for future discoveries,” he added.
Source: BFM TV
