All the same, telltale characteristics in the dinosaur’s bones more closely resemble those of sauropodomorphs than the traits found in other dinosaur groups. Mbiresaurus was only about five feet long, and it ran on two legs. The new dinosaur did not look anything like a miniature Apatosaurus, despite that giant being among its famous relatives. Paleontologist Christopher Griffin holds tailbones and a limb end of Mbiresaurus. “We’re really only missing parts of the hands, an ankle bone and a few of the skull elements,” Griffin says. This roughly 230-million-year-old Mbiresaurus is represented by a nearly complete skeleton, containing parts of the skull and spinal column and elements of both the front and hind legs. The newly found specimen, which was surprisingly complete for a very early dinosaur, belonged to a group called sauropodomorphs. “The femur is one of those distinctive bones that you can tell right away is from a dinosaur,” he says, “so once I dug that out, I knew I was holding the oldest definitive dinosaur ever found in Africa.” During one such expedition, Griffin recalls, he uncovered what turned out to be the left femur of a Mbiresaurus. After Raath reported fossils of a similarly early age in Zimbabwe, paleontologists went looking for more-and got more than they anticipated. “Dinosaurs began to disperse across the globe during this time,” Griffin says, with the earliest dinosaur remains generally found at localities that would have been at the same latitude in Triassic South America and India. The dinosaur’s discovery came from an effort to understand how plants and animals were affected by climate change during the Triassic period, between 252 million and 201 million years ago. The creature is the oldest dinosaur yet found in Africa, Yale University paleontologist Christopher Griffin and his colleagues report-and it represents the early days of a lineage that would come to include classic dinosaurs such as Diplodocus. The moniker references Mbire, the district of Zimbabwe where the fossil was found, and pays tribute to paleontologist Michael Raath, who first published on fossils from the area. The new dinosaur, described on Wednesday in Nature, is named Mbiresaurus raathi. Now paleontologists have uncovered one of the earliest members of this storied lineage of lumbering giants: a svelte, much smaller omnivore that once darted across the floodplains of prehistoric Zimbabwe. Some grew to more than 100 feet long and weighed more than 80 tons. This group of long-necked, four-legged herbivores, such as the celebrated species Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus, included the largest creatures to ever walk the planet. Sauropods were dinosaurs that truly lived large.
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