When Dinosaurs Lived When Africa and South America Were One Continent

A study published on August 23 by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in the United States, lists 260 similar footprints of Cretaceous dinosaurs, discovered in both Brazil and Cameroon. These are fossilized footprints, 120 million years old, that dinosaur feet imprinted in the mud on both sides of the Atlantic.

These footprints clearly belong to dinosaurs of the same type and age, and are now 6,000 km apart. But for the international team of paleontologists who studied them, these fossil traces suggest that, during their lifetime, these dinosaurs could pass freely from Brazil to Cameroon through a strip of land that still connected the two continents.

Indeed, we knew that Africa and America initially formed only one supercontinent. But this discovery provides a little more detail on the chronology of the separation of the two continents because the movement was very slow and gradual. Africa and South America began to move apart 140 million years ago.

But 20 million years after the start of this movement, there were still areas of terrestrial junction. These footprints tell us both that dinosaurs frequented this corridor, and that there was a similar environment on both sides, favorable to their survival. After analyzing plate tectonic movements, climate reconstruction, the existence of potential rivers or lakes, these researchers indicate that these dinosaurs probably lived in this place in an environment close to that of a tropical rainforest, with abundant vegetation.

This work is valuable both for tracing the stages of continental drift and for following the historical evolution of landscapes and biodiversity on Earth.