The dinosaur may have been an omnivore or a herbivore based on its small, serrated teeth, which were triangular in shape.
Digital Desk: The oldest
dinosaur skeleton yet discovered in Africa, according to a team of
paleontologists, has been uncovered in a new early skeleton. Mbiresaurus
raathi, a long-necked dinosaur, is thought to have been around 6 feet long and
weighed between 10 and 30 kilograms. The mostly entire fossil was found in
Northern Zimbabwe by a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, and it was found over the
course of two digs in 2017 and 2019.
The research's results
were released in August in the journal Nature. Only a part of the dinosaur's
skull and a few of its hands are still visible in the skeleton. Paleontologists
from the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, the Natural History Museum
of Zimbabwe, and Universidade de So Paulo, So Paulo, Brazil are among the
international team members who took part in the research.
"Mbiresaurus raathi's discovery closes a
significant geographic gap in the fossil record of the oldest dinosaurs and demonstrates
the effectiveness of hypothesis-driven fieldwork for verifying theories about
the distant past. These are the first confirmed dinosaurs from Africa, and they
are around the same age as the earliest dinosaurs discovered anywhere else on
the globe.
The oldest known
dinosaurs, dating from the Carnian Stage of the Late Triassic period around 230
million years ago, are extremely rare and have only been discovered in a small
number of locations worldwide, namely northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and India.
remarked the fossil's finder, Christopher Griffin, in a press release.
According to the researchers' findings,
Mbiresaurus, like many of its dinosaur relatives, stood on two legs and had a
head that was small in relation to those legs. The dinosaur may have been an
omnivore or a herbivore based on its small, serrated teeth, which were
triangular in shape.
"We never anticipated discovering a
dinosaur skeleton that was so complete and well-preserved. The moment I laid
eyes on Mbiresaurus' femur, I realized it belonged to a dinosaur and that I was
holding the oldest dinosaur ever discovered in Africa. Griffin continued,
"I had to stop and take a breath when I started digging and found the left
hip bone exactly next to the left thigh bone because I realized that a lot of
the skeleton was definitely there, still articulated together in life position.
