New species of dinosaur is oldest ever found in Africa – Fighting Hawks Magazine

Sauropods were dinosaurs that really lived giants. This group of long-necked, four-legged herbivores, like the famous species apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus, encompassed the largest creatures that have ever roamed the planet. Some were over 100 feet long and weighed over 80 tons. Now paleontologists have uncovered one of many earliest members of this fabled lineage of lumbering giants: a slender, much smaller omnivore that went on to soar through the flood plains of prehistoric Zimbabwe.

The brand new dinosaur described Wednesday in Natureis known as Mbiresaurus raathi. The nickname refers to Mbire, the district of Zimbabwe where the fossil was discovered, and pays homage to paleontologist Michael Raath, who was the first to print fossils from the kingdom. The creature is the oldest dinosaur yet found in Africa, Yale College paleontologist Christopher Griffin and his colleagues report — and it represents the early days of a lineage that might contain traditional dinosaurs Diplodocus.

The discovery of the dinosaur arose from trying to figure out how vegetation and animals were affected by local weather changes during the Triassic interval 252 million to 201 million years ago. “Dinosaurs began to spread across the globe during this time,” says Griffin, with the earliest dinosaur remains typically discovered at locations that may have been at similar latitudes in Triassic South America and India. After Raath in Zimbabwe reported fossils of just as early an age, paleontologists went looking for more – and found more than expected. During one such expedition, Griffin recalls discovering what turned out to be a’s left femur Mbiresaurus. “The femur is a kind of distinctive bone that you can immediately tell is from a dinosaur,” he says, “when I dug it up I knew I used to hold the oldest definitive dinosaur ever found in Africa .”

The newly discovered specimen, which was surprisingly full for a really early dinosaur, belonged to a group called sauropodomorphs. This approximately 230 million year old Mbiresaurus is represented by a virtually complete skeleton, containing components of the skull and spine, and components of each of the input and hind legs. “Actually, all we’re missing are parts of the palms, an knuckle, and some parts of the skull,” says Griffin.

The all-new dinosaur didn’t look like a miniature Apatosaurus, notwithstanding that giant being among its familiar family members. Mbiresaurus was only about 5 feet long and walked on two legs. All of the identical, telltale features in the dinosaur’s bones more closely resemble those of sauropodomorphs than the features present in other groups of dinosaurs.

Mbiresaurus lived at a time when the ancestors of the good sauropods were small, fleet-footed omnivores who only had to switch to a purely vegetarian diet.

Evolutionary relationships between early dinosaurs are usually a contentious issue in paleontology. A small dinosaur from Triassic Argentina named eraptorfor example, was originally categorized as a member of the theropod – a really early progenitor of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex– but was later discovered to be a sauropodomorph. “About 230 million years ago, dinosaurs had already split into their three main groups, but they were still similar,” says paleontologist Diego Pol of the Egidio Feruglio Paleontological Museum in Argentina, who reviewed the brand-new research Nature however, was indirectly involved in the work. Nonetheless, Pol notes, Mbiresaurus “appears to be a really primitive sauropodomorph, very similar to the family members of the same age that we all know from South America.”

The world Mbiresaurus lived was very different from the earth as we all know it now. Many of the planet’s landmasses were confined within the supercontinent Pangea, and Zimbabwe was farther south and farther from any ocean than it is today. Many of the animals the dinosaur lived with were also quite diverse, from weasel-like proto-mammals called cynodonts to armadillo-like crocodile family members called aetosaurs. The native habitat would have been a semi-arid place, with ferns, horsetails and conifers rising along streams and lakes – sediments from which they were eventually buried Mbiresaurus and its neighbors.

And dinosaurs couldn’t roam wherever they wanted during that time. Putt Mbiresaurus In the broader sample of dinosaur origins and distribution around the globe, Griffin and his co-authors arrived at a state of affairs that implied that there were robust local weather obstructions at the prehistoric equator. These scorching zones quickly prevented dinosaurs from moving across the Earth’s centerline. Dinosaurs emerged and began to diversify in the southern parts of Pangea and will only move north once such obstacles are removed, resulting in what Griffin and his colleagues suggest are different stages of dinosaur dispersal around traded the globe. “This gives us a glimpse into the dynamics of the Triassic world,” says Pol, when the reptilian age was just beginning to assert itself.