Researchers discovered a new species of titanosaurian, which were large-bodied sauropods that walked Tanzania during the last era of the dinosaurs.
The new species, dubbed Rukwatitan bisepultu, was first spotted in a cliff wall in the Rukwa Rift Basin of southwestern Tanzania. The research team was able to recover vertebrae, ribs, limbs and pelvic bones over the course of several months, the National Science Foundation reported.
CT scans of the fossil revealed unique features that suggested the dinosaur was different from others seen in the past.
"This titanosaur finding is rare for Africa, and will help resolve questions about the distribution and regional characteristics of what would later become one of the largest land animals known," said Paul Filmer, a program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "Titanosaurians make up the vast majority of known Cretaceous sauropods, and have been found on every continent, yet Africa has so far yielded only four formally recognized members."
The dinosaur is believed to have lived about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. It was an herbivorous dinosaur with a large body and long neck; it may have weighed as much as several elephants.
"Using traditional and new computational approaches, we were able to place the new species within the family tree of sauropod dinosaurs and determine its uniqueness as a species--and to delineate other species with which it is most closely related," said lead paper author Eric Gorscak, a biologist at Ohio University.
The dinosaur is distinct from titanosaurians from northern Africa just as the fossils of middle Cretaceous crocodile relatives from the Rukwa Rift Basin are different from others on the continent.
"There may have been certain environmental features, such as deserts, large waterways and/or mountain ranges, that would have limited the movement of animals and promoted the evolution of regionally distinct faunas," said co-author Patrick O'Connor, an anatomist at Ohio University's Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.
"Only additional data on faunas and paleoenvironments from around the continent will let us further test such hypotheses," he said.
The findings were published Sept. 9 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
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