We may now call back of Egypt as being mostly wrap up with sand , but from the desert investigator have expose themost complete African dinosaur fossilfrom the later Cretaceous period yet , helping us empathise the ancient links between Africa and Europe so long ago .
The dinosaur has been namedMansourasaurus shahinae , and belong to the group of sauropods known as Titanosaurs . While this include some truly massive individual such asDreadnoughtusandArgentinosaurus , this African cousin was much smaller in size , only weighing around the same as a bull African elephant .
“ Mansourasaurus shahinaeis a primal new dinosaur species , and a critical discovery for Egyptian and African palaeontology,”explainedDr Eric Gorscak , joint author of the paper print inNature Ecology and Evolution . “ Africa remains a giant question marking in terms of land - dwelling beast at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs .
“ Mansourasaurushelps us name and address longstanding questions about Africa ’s fossil record book and paleobiology – what animals were last there , and to what other coinage were these animals most closely related ? ”
Most of what we roll in the hay about the dinosaurs – and of course other brute that were scurry around at the time – during the Late Cretaceous comes from the bone beds and fogy deposits of North America , the Gobi Desert , and Patagonia . When it comes to what creatures were stalking what is now the African continent some 100 million years ago , there is amassive col in our cognition .
This makes the discovery ofMansourasaurusincredibly rare , and immensely important .
At the sentence in enquiry , the continents were undergo extreme geological and geographical change . Africa had already split from South America by this point , put many lineage on different evolutionary route . But the stage of connexion between Northern Africa and further south , as well as with Europe and Asia , has still been something of a mystery .
By using dinosaur , and looking to see how closely they were related in differing areas , however , fossilist are able to get a better idea of how well these regions were connected . The more close related the dinosaur , the easier it must have been for them to make the move from one continent to another .
And it sprain out thatMansourasauruswas more similar to those from Europe and Asia than southerly Africa and South America . “ Africa ’s last dinosaurs were n’t completely isolated , contrary to what some have proposed in the past , ” say Gorscak . “ There were still connective to Europe . ”
The sauropod remains were unearthed in the Sahara Desert in Egypt by a team of fossilist from Mansoura University . They find oneself a huge raiment of bones , from costa and back vertebrae to the shoulders and forelimbs , and even portion of the skull and piece of cutaneous plate . This makes the fossil the most complete previous Cretaceous dinosaur ever come across in Africa .
