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A reconstruction of the new titanosaur and the landscape in which it lived, in what is now Tanzania.
A new species of giant dinosaur which roamed southern Africa 70 million years ago has been unearthed in Tanzania.
The five-ton long-necked herbivore lived in the Cretaceous period when Madagascar and Antarctica split off from southern Africa‚ followed by the gradual “unzipping” of South America.
Similar skeletons have been found worldwide‚ but are best known from South America. Fossils in this group are rare in Africa.
The new dinosaur is called Shingopana songwensis‚ derived from the Swahili term “shingopana” (wide neck) and the location of the fossils in the Songwe region of the Great Rift Valley in south-western Tanzania. It was about 8m long.
“There are anatomical features present only in Shingopana and in several South American titanosaurs‚” said Eric Gorscak‚ a US palaeontologist who reported the find in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. “Shingopana had siblings in South America‚ whereas other African titanosaurs were only distant cousins.”
Judy Skog‚ of the US National Science Foundation‚ said: “This discovery suggests that the fauna of northern and southern Africa were very different in the Cretaceous period. At that time‚ southern Africa dinosaurs were more closely related to those in South America‚ and were more widespread than we knew.”
Paper co-author Eric Roberts‚ of James Cook University in Australia‚ said the Shingopana bones were damaged by the borings of ancient insects shortly after death.
“The presence of bone-borings provides a CSI-like opportunity to study the skeleton and reconstruct the timing of death and burial‚ and offers rare evidence of ancient insects and complex food webs during the age of the dinosaurs‚” he said.
Cretaceous period
Believed to be a member of the gigantic, long-necked sauropods, which are the giants of the dinosaur family, its fossils were estimated to be from the Cretaceous Period, noted for being the last portion of the “Age of Dinosaurs”, about 70-100 million years ago.
After performing numerous analyses on the skeletons, the team of palaeontologists determined that the animal was different from other dinosaurs identified before, including those previously discovered in other parts of Africa.
“Using both traditional and new computational approaches, we were able to place the new species within the family tree of sauropod dinosaurs and determine both its uniqueness as a species and to delineate other species with which it is most closely related,” study author Eric Gorscak, a doctoral student in biological sciences at Ohio University, said in a statement.
Divisions between tectonic plates may explain the differences between dinosaurs. Evidence suggests that northern and southern Africa were divided during the Crateceous era.
Diversity
“We are still only scratching the surface with regard to understanding the diversity of organisms and the environments in which they lived on the African continent during the Late Cretaceopus,” study co-author Patrick O’Connor said. Part of the Shingopana fossils were excavated in 2002 by scientists affiliated with the Rukwa Rift Basin Project, an international effort led by Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine researchers.
Later, more portions of the dinosaur’s skeletons, including its neck vertebrae, ribs, and the lower jaw, were recovered. It is believed that the dinosaur roamed ancient southern Africa alongside another gigantic plant-eating dinosaur named Rukwatitan Bisepultus, which weighed nearly 8,000kgs. It was discovered by the same team of scientists in 2014.
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