The skeleton was found by a team of researchers from Zimbabwe, Zambia and the United States, during two expeditions in 2017 and 2019.
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He lived about 230 million years ago. Scientists in Zimbabwe announced the discovery of the remains of Africa’s oldest dinosaur on Thursday (September 1). This dinosaur, named Mbiresaurus raathi, was only about one meter tall, with a long tail and weighed up to 30 kg, according to the international team of paleontologists who made the discovery.
“He ran on two legs and had a rather small head”, Christopher Griffin, the scientist who unearthed the first bone, told AFP. It is probably an omnivore that fed on plants, small animals and insects. The dinosaur belongs to the sauropodomorph species, the same lineage that would later include giant long-necked dinosaurs, according to the researcher at Yale University (USA).
The skeleton was found by a team of researchers from Zimbabwe, Zambia and the United States, during two expeditions in 2017 and 2019. “I dug out the whole femur and knew then that it was a dinosaur and I had the oldest known dinosaur fossil in Africa”, said Christopher Griffin. His team’s findings were first published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Dinosaur remains from the same era had so far only been found in South America and India.
The paleontologists chose Zimbabwe to dig, after calculating that it was around the same latitude as earlier discoveries in South America, when all the continents were connected as a single landmass.
“Mbiresaurus raathi is remarkably similar to some dinosaurs of the same age found in Brazil and Argentina, which reinforces the fact that South America and Africa were part of a continuous landmass”said Max Langer of the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil).