A new fossil study reveals that a dinosaur with a long neck, jagged teeth, and a long tail roamed Zimbabwe 230 million years ago.
The dinosaur, named Mbiresaurus raathi, was approximately six feet long and weighed between 20 and 65 pounds. It is the oldest dinosaur ever discovered in Africa.
Dr. Christopher Griffin from the Virginia Tech College of Science stated, “The finding of Mbiresaurus raathi fills in a significant geographic gap in the fossil record of the oldest dinosaurs and demonstrates the effectiveness of hypothesis-driven fieldwork for validating predictions about the ancient past.”
‘These are Africa’s definitively oldest dinosaurs, roughly similar in age to the oldest dinosaurs discovered anywhere else.
The earliest known dinosaurs, which lived approximately 230 million years ago during the Carnian Period of the Late Triassic, are extremely rare and have only been discovered in a handful of locations worldwide, primarily in northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and India.
The skeleton of Mbiresaurus raathi was discovered in northern Zimbabwe, missing only portions of its hand and skull.
Dr. Sterling Nesbitt, one of the study’s authors, stated, “Early dinosaurs like Mbiresaurus raathi demonstrate that the early evolution of dinosaurs is still being written with each discovery and that the rise of dinosaurs was far more complex than previously thought.”
According to an investigation of its fossilized bones, Mbiresaurus stood on two legs and had a relatively small head with short, triangular, serrated teeth.
According to Dr. Griffin, this indicates that the animal was likely a herbivore or omnivore.
Dr. Griffin stated, “We never anticipated uncovering such a full and well-preserved dinosaur skeleton.”
When I discovered the femur of Mbiresaurus, I immediately recognized it as a dinosaur femur and knew I was holding the oldest dinosaur ever discovered in Africa.
“When I continued to dig and discovered the left hip bone next to the left thigh bone, I had to take a deep breath — I knew that a significant portion of the skeleton was likely still articulated together in life position.”
In addition to Mbiresaurus, the researchers discovered fossils of a herrerasaurid dinosaur, early mammal relatives such as cynodonts, armored crocodylian relatives such as aetosaurs, and ‘bizarre, archaic reptiles’ known as rhynchosaurs.
The researchers believe that their findings may shed light on the time and location of early dinosaur migrations.
When the Earth’s continents formed a single supercontinent called Pangea, it was believed that the climate was separated into climate belts, which controlled the distribution of species.
It was believed that latitudinal belts had intensely wet and dry climates, whereas higher latitudes and lower tropics were more temperate.
Dr. Griffin noted, “Because dinosaurs initially distributed under this climate pattern, their early dispersal should have been regulated by latitude.”
The oldest dinosaurs are known from nearly the same ancient latitudes along the southern temperate temperature belt, which was roughly 50 degrees south at the time.
The researchers picked northern Zimbabwe because it fell along this climate belt and connected southern Brazil and India during the Late Triassic Period.
According to Michel Zondo, curator and fossil preparation at the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, the finding of Mbiresaurus is a fascinating and unique find for Zimbabwe and the broader paleontological community.
The fact that the Mbiresaurus skeleton is nearly complete gives it an ideal reference for future discoveries.
It is the first discovery of a sauropodomorph of this size in Zimbabwe; most of our sauropodomorph discoveries here are typical of medium- to large-sized animals.
