Christopher Griffin of Yale University found of a dinosaur femur
sticking out of the ground, and that led to the discovery of near-
complete fossil is the oldest dinosaur fossil found in Africa to date.
“I kept digging, got more of the team to help out, and we recovered
nearly the entire skeleton,” he says. “The rocks it was found in have
been interpreted as a river deposit, and it may have been buried in a
small-scale flood.”
Recently revealed reports by the excavation team in a scientific
journal say that the find named after the Mbire area to the North of
Zimbabwe, Mbiresaurus raathi, stood at least a metre tall, ran on
two legs, weighed around 30 kilograms, and had a small head, a long
neck and serrated, leaf-shaped teeth.
Griffin’s team has dated M. raathi to around 230 million years ago,
part of the Late Triassic called the Carnian stage. At that time,
Zimbabwe was much further south, and part of the massive
supercontinent Pangaea.
Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley is already known for its occasional
dinosaur bones and a trackway of dinosaur footprints, but M.
raathi is older.
“What this means is that Zimbabwe records the transition from the
earliest dinosaurs, when they were more rare, to a time when
dinosaurs had become much more abundant and dominant,” says
Griffin.
Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan at the University of Cape Town, South
Africa, says the latest find provides a view into the faunal diversity
that existed in that part of northern Zimbabwe 230 million years ago.
This is the second dinosaur find from Africa in two months after
Iyuku raathi was found in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province in
July.
The new Zimbabwean fossil find is in the Cabora Bassa Basin where
exploratory drilling for oil and gas is set to begin next month.
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