Fri 02 September 2022:
Scientists in Zimbabwe have discovered the remnants of Africa’s first dinosaur, which roamed the planet some 230 million years ago.
A group of palaeontologists from different countries unearthed the dinosaur, which is known as Mbiresaurus raathi. It could weigh up to 30 kilograms, was only one metre (3.2 feet) tall, and had a lengthy tail (66 pounds).
The first bone’s discoverer, Christopher Griffin, told AFP on Thursday that the animal “ran around on two legs and had a fairly small head.”
Griffin, a 31-year-old Yale University researcher, asserts that the dinosaur belonged to the sauropodomorph species, the same linage as later enormous long-necked dinosaurs. Most likely an omnivore, it ate plants, insects, and small animals.
During two expeditions in 2017 and 2019, a group of researchers from Zimbabwe, Zambia, and the United States discovered the skeleton.
Griffin, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech University at the time, recalled, “I dug out the full femur and I knew at that instant, that it was a dinosaur and I was holding Africa’s earliest known dinosaur fossil.”
The research done by his team was initially released in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Only South America and India had previously yielded dinosaur fossils from the same time period.
After discovering that it was about at the same latitude as earlier finds in modern-day South America from a time when all the continents were connected in a geographical mass known as Pangea, palaeontologists decided to dig in Zimbabwe.
According to Max Langer of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, “Mbiresaurus raathi is remarkably similar to some dinosaurs of the same age found in Brazil and Argentina, reinforcing that South America and Africa were part of a continuous landmass during the Late Triassic.”
The name of the dinosaur honors both the skeleton’s locality in Zimbabwe’s northeastern Mbire district and palaeontologist Michael Raath, who made the first fossil discoveries in the region.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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