Johannesburg, South Africa
The remains of Africa's earliest dinosaur, which walked the world some 230 million years ago, have been found by scientists in Zimbabwe.
The dinosaur, known as Mbiresaurus raathi, was discovered by an international team of palaeontologists. It was only about one metre (3.2 feet) tall, had a long tail, and could weigh up to 30 kilogrammes (66 pounds).
Christopher Griffin, the researcher who found the first bone, told AFP on Thursday that the creature "ran around on two legs and had a fairly small head."
According to Griffin, a 31-year-old researcher at Yale University, the dinosaur belonged to the sauropodomorph species, the same linage that would eventually include huge long-necked dinosaurs. It was likely an omnivore that consumed plants, small animals, and insects.
During two expeditions in 2017 and 2019, a group of researchers from Zimbabwe, Zambia, and the United States discovered the skeleton.
Griffin, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech University at the time, recalled, "I dug out the full femur and I knew at that instant, that it was a dinosaur and I was holding Africa's earliest known dinosaur fossil."
The research done by his team was initially released in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Only South America and India had previously yielded dinosaur fossils from the same time period.
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The palaeontologists chose the Zimbabwe site for digging after determining that it lay roughly at the same latitude as earlier discoveries in present-day South America when all the continents were linked in a land mass known as Pangea.
According to Max Langer of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, "Mbiresaurus raathi is remarkably similar to some dinosaurs of the same age found in Brazil and Argentina, reinforcing that South America and Africa were part of a continuous landmass during the Late Triassic."
The skeleton's location in Zimbabwe's northeastern Mbire district and palaeontologist Michael Raath, who discovered the area's first fossils, is honoured by the name of the dinosaur.
(with inputs from agencies)