Africa’s oldest known dinosaur skeleton to bridge the ‘Missing Middle’

An international team of paleontologists led by Virginia Tech has discovered a skeleton of new long-necked dinosaur Mbiresaurus raathi, that fills a critical geographic gap in the fossil record of the oldest dinosaurs.

The skeleton, mostly intact, was first found by a graduate student in the Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences and other paleontologists during two excavations over the course of period in 2017 and 2019.

Published on Thursday in the journal Nature, the findings show that the skeleton is the oldest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Africa. The animal is estimated to have been 6 feet long with a long tail. It weighed anywhere from 20 to 65 pounds. The skeleton, missing only some of the hand and portions of the skull, was found in northern Zimbabwe.

Dinosaur

“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.

Africa’s oldest-known definitive dinosaurs, it was roughly equivalent in age to the oldest dinosaurs found anywhere in the world. The oldest known dinosaurs — from roughly 230 million years ago, the Carnian Stage of the Late Triassic period — are extremely rare and have been recovered from northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and India.

Sterling Nesbitt, co-author of the study, said, “Early dinosaurs like Mbiresaurus raathi show that the early evolution of dinosaurs is still being written with each new find and the rise of dinosaurs was far more complicated than previously predicted.”