Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Newly discovered dinosaur: Mansourasaurus
Fossil from between 66 to 100 million years ago, help scientists understand African species
FOR a long time, scientists scratched their heads in wonder about what kind of dinosaurs roamed Africa.
A newly discovered dinosaur named Mansourasaurus has scientists excited.
It is named after a university in Egypt, Mansoura University, which helped in the discovery of the fossils and ancient remains of the animal.
Matthew Lamanna is a palaeontologist, a scientist who studies the history of life, ancient bones for example. He can still remember the day of the discovery. Hesham Sallam, emailed him pictures of the ancient skeleton that had just been unearthed by his team in Egypt.
From one photo of a large lower jawbone, Lamanna knew that Sallam had found a dinosaur.
Lamanna, a dinosaur researcher at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said: “When you stare at dinosaur bones a lot, you learn to recognise parts of dinosaur bones quickly.”
But this wouldn’t just be any dinosaur.
Sallam and his team at Egypt’s Mansoura University had discovered a new species, which lived between 66 to
100 million years ago, a time known as the end of the “Age of Dinosaurs”.
The newly discovered dinosaur was part of the Titanosauria family. These were long-necked plant-eaters that include “some of the largest animals known to science”, according to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which made the announcement recently.
The Mansourasaurus would have been roughly the length of a school bus and weighed about the same as an African bull elephant, with bony plates embedded along its back.
The jawbone was found along with other parts of the skeleton including the skull.
“These things evolved 220 million years ago and went extinct about 66 million years ago,” Lamanna said. “Even like part of a tail from one of these sauropods would have been great. The fact that Sallam had found a dinosaur from the end of the ‘Age of Dinosaurs’ and it was a sauropod that had part of a head, it was just completely bonkers.”
Scientists said the fossils would help them understand how dinosaurs evolved in
Africa when the continents had neared the end of their shift from a single giant land mass to where they are, more or less, today.
“Africa remains a giant question mark in terms of landdwelling animals at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs,” said Eric Gorscak, a research scientist. “Mansourasaurus helps us with questions about Africa’s fossils – what animals used to live here, what other species were these animals closely related?”
Gorscak said Mansourasaurus’s fossils show it was more closely related to dinosaurs from Europe and Asia than those in southern Africa or South America.
But he said there was more to discover from the Mansourasaurus fossils: “It’s like finding an edge piece that you use to help figure out what the puzzle is, that you can build from. Maybe even a corner piece.”
The Mansourasaurus fossils have been moved to the fossil collection at the university, near Cairo, and will stay there to be studied. – Washington Post.