• Africa’s oldest dinosaur discovered in Northern Zimbabwe

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    Africa’s oldest dinosaur discovered in Northern Zimbabwe

    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.



    color:black;mso-themecolor:text1">"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.

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    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.



    color:black;mso-themecolor:text1">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.



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    "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.