Original Story Published by: Virginia Tech, SciTechDaily, www.scitechdaily.com
Photo Source: Audrey Atuckin
(Above) Artistic reconstruction of Mbiresaurus Raathi (in the foreground) with the rest of the Zimbabwean animal assemblage in the background. It includes two ryynchosaurs(at the front right) and awtosaure (at left), and a herrerasaurid dinosaur chasing a cynodont (at the back right)
During two digs in Zimbabwe in 2017 and 2019, a graduate student from Virginia Tech discovered and unearthed the fossil with the assistance of other paleontologists.
A new, early dinosaur has been found and named by an international team of paleontologists under the direction of Virginia Tech. The skeleton was discovered by a graduate student in the Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences and other paleontologists over the course of two excavations, in 2017 and 2019. Astonishingly, most of the skeleton is still complete.
The findings of this new sauropodomorph – a long-necked dinosaur — named Mbiresaurus raathi were recently published in Nature. The skeleton is the oldest dinosaur skeleton that has so far been discovered in Africa. The animal had a long tail and was said to have been 6 feet long. It weighed anywhere from 20 to 65 pounds. The skeleton, which was discovered in northern Zimbabwe, was only missing portions of the hand and skull.
“The discovery of Mbiresaurus raathi fills in a critical geographic gap in the fossil record of the oldest dinosaurs and shows the power of hypothesis-driven fieldwork for testing predictions about the ancient past,” said Christopher Griffin, who graduated in 2020 with a Ph.D. in geosciences from the Virginia Tech College of Science.
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