Mbiresaurus stood on two legs and had a relatively small head with small triangular teeth. It was probably herbivorous or omnivorous.
An international team of paleontologists has discovered and named a previously unknown very early dinosaur, Mbiresaurus raathi, which is the oldest yet found in Africa, where it lived about 230 million years ago. His skeleton was found unexpectedly largely intact in Northern Zimbabwe.
It is a small dinosaur with a long tail, which reached a length of about two meters and had a weight of 10 to 30 kilograms. Mbiresaurus stood on two legs and had a relatively small head with small triangular teeth. It was probably herbivorous or omnivorous.
The researchers from the USA, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Brazil, led by Dr. Christopher Griffin of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Virginia Tech (Virginia Tech), who made the relevant publication in the journal “Nature”, said that “discovery closes critical geographic gap in fossil record of earliest dinosaurs.”
Griffin said, “This is the oldest known dinosaur from Africa, about the same age as the oldest dinosaurs found elsewhere in the world. The oldest known dinosaurs – living about 230 million years ago during the Late Triassic period – are extremely rare and have been discovered in only a few parts of the world, mainly in northern Argentina, southern Brazil and India. We never expected to find such a complete and well-preserved skeleton of an ancient early dinosaur.”
Its naming is due to Mbire being the name of the area where the ancient animal was discovered, while it is also the name of a historical dynasty that ruled it in the past. The raathi was named in honor of paleontologist Michael Raath, who first found fossils in northern Zimbabwe.
Africa, like all continents, was once part of the supercontinent Pangaea. The first dinosaurs were – due to climate – initially limited to southern Pangaea and only later in their history did they spread more widely.
The Mbiresaurus fossil is temporarily stored at Virginia Tech, where it was cleaned and studied, but will then be moved permanently to the Zimbabwe Museum of Natural History.
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