Feb 3, 2025
Mbiresaurus remake
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Mbiresaurus remake
New dinosaur alert! Presenting Mbiresaurus raathi
Image ID: A digital illustration of the early sauropodomorph dinosaur Mbiresaurus. It is a slender, two-legged dinosaur with a long neck and tail and a body covered in fluffy feathers. The feathers are brown with lighter speckles that turn into stripes on the tail. The head and neck are wrinkled and featherless except for a few long feathers that hang from the base of the neck. The head and neck are coloured with patches of black and white, and an orange lower jaw. The Mbiresaurus is posed in a rough three-quarter view, facing to the right and away from the viewer. The neck is upright and alert, the mouth is slightly open, one foot is raised off the ground and the tail is curved around in front of its legs. End ID.
A newly-described species from Zimbabwe, Mbiresaurus is now the oldest named dinosaur species from Africa! It’s an early sauropodomorph, related to dinosaurs like Eoraptor and Buriolestes, and was probably an omnivore.
Mbiresaurus comes from a new fossil site in Zimbabwe, which contains a whole lot of other species that have yet to be described, including a herrerasaurid, which I’ve represented in this size diagram with Staurikosaurus.
Image ID: A size chart showing Mbiresaurus and the early carnivorous dinosaur Staurikosaurus next to a light grey silhouette of a person. The Mbiresaurus’ head is level with the person’s upper thigh, and the Staurikosaurus’ head comes to approximately waist height. End ID.
The formation also includes a number of synapsid species, a rhynchosaur, and an aetosaur, a group of armoured herbivorous crocodile relatives that had never been found in southern Africa before! When combined together into Pangaea, the location of the fossil site matches the latitude of other Late Triassic early dinosaur sites, suggesting that dinosaurs and other Late Triassic species initially migrated across a similar climatic band that would eventually become South America and southern Africa.
Round Three: Mbiresaurus vs Kholumalumo
Mbiresaurus raathi
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Raath’s reptile from Mbire (after the Mbire district of Zimbabwe, and in honour of palaeontologist and discoverer Michael Raath)
Time: ~ 230 million years ago (Carnian stage of the Late Triassic)
Location: Pebbly Arkose Formation, Zimbabwe
There was once a time… before titanosaurs… before diplodocids… before any sauropod… when sauropodomorphs were simply Just Some Little Guy. And that is where Mbiresaurus, oldest African dinosaur ever found, comes in!
Mbiresaurus was named in 2022 from Zimbabwe, and is the only dinosaur yet named from the Pebbly Arkose formation. It’s known from a beautifully complete skeleton that has all the features of a classic Early Dinosaur. It is small, has long gangly legs and arms, and a lil head with vaguely pointy kinda multipurpose teeth. The fact that all the wild diversity and enormous size of the sauropods came out of something like this is hard to imagine, but evolutionarily step by step these little scampery dudes would work their way up!
Kholumolumo ellenbergerorum
Artwork by @alphynix, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Kholumolumo (giant reptilian dragon from Sotho folklore) named for Paul and François Ellenberger (the original excavators of the fossils)
Time: 210 million years ago (Norian stage of the Late Triassic)
Location: Lower Elliot Formation, Lesotho
Kholumolumo is an old friend with a new name. Its previous informal name, “Thotobolosaurus” meaning “trash heap reptile”, was truly magnificent and became one of the great memes of Ye Olde 2010s Palaeo Tumblr! Needless to say it was a bittersweet moment to see our old buddy finally published but lose its iconic name in the process. Rest in peace, Trash Heap Lizard.
The reason it wound up with that name is because the fossils were in fact found basically right next to the local rubbish dump of the village of Maphutseng in 1955. The trash pile turned out to be sitting on a bone bed of around five to ten animals, and over the course of several years they were excavated and moved to the University of Cape Town. Unfortunately, and perhaps appropriately to the name, the subsequent study of these fossils ended up being a complete trash fire. Specimens went missing that have never been found, professional relationships fell apart, and the animal itself wasn’t mentioned in the literature until 1970 when it was dropped into a discussion on the stratigraphy of the Elliot formation and named “Thotobolosaurus mabeatae” without any description of the fossils. This made the name “Thotobolosaurus” a nomen nudum (naked name) and thus invalid.
Finally in 2020 all the tribulation paid off and it received a proper initial description, although many fossils that weren’t lost in the chaos still remain under study and could be the subject of future papers. It’s nice to see our beloved trash heap of a dinosaur finally coming into its own!
Mbiresaurus or Kholumalumo?
Mbiresaurus
Kholumalumo
Mbiresaurus raathi Griffin et al., 2022 (new genus and species)
(Select bones and schematic skeletal of Mbiresaurus raathi [scale bars = 1 cm for most individual bones; 1 mm for “s”, an individual tooth; and 20 cm for the skeletal], with preserved bones in white, from Griffin et al., 2022)
Meaning of name: Mbiresaurus = Mbire lizard [in Greek]; raathi = for Michael Raath [South African paleontologist]
Age: Late Triassic (Carnian)
Where found: Pebbly Arkose Formation, Mashonaland Central, Zimbabwe
How much is known: Skeletons of at least two individuals, one of which is nearly complete. Some isolated femora (thigh bones) from the same region may also belong to this taxon.
Notes: Mbiresaurus was an early sauropodomorph. Although sauropodomorphs famously include gigantic, long-necked quadrupeds, the earliest members of this group, including Mbiresaurus, were relatively small (less than 2 m long), bipedal dinosaurs.
Other than the controversial Nyasasaurus, which is only known from fragmentary remains, Mbiresaurus is the oldest known dinosaur from Africa, and possibly one of the oldest known dinosaurs in the world. Dinosaur fossils of similar age have otherwise only been found in South America and India. The fossil sites where such early dinosaurs were discovered were all situated at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere during the Late Triassic, which may suggest that the oldest dinosaurs were restricted to this geographic region.
Reference: Griffin, C.T., B.M. Wynd, D. Munyikwa, T.J. Broderick, M. Zondo, S. Tolan, M.C. Langer, S.J. Nesbitt, and H.R. Taruvinga. 2022. Africa's oldest dinosaurs reveal early suppression of dinosaur distribution. Nature advance online publication. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05133-x
Hi there!
My take on the Mbiresaurus raathi, the new and oldest dinosaur from Africa
‘I’ve got a dinosaur!’ African find illuminates dawn of dinos
230 million years ago, the earliest dinosaurs thrived in mild climates
During the late Triassic period, when the terrestrial world was a single sprawling land mass called Pangaea, a dog-size plant-eating dinosaur perished near a river in the southern part of the continent. When the river flooded, its body was buried by sediment, with some bones still articulated as in life.
About 230 million years later, paleontologist Chris Griffin, then a doctoral student at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, spotted a thigh bone sticking out of a hill in the Cabora Bassa River Basin in what is now Zimbabwe. “I’ve got a dinosaur!” he called to his team.
In the weeks that followed, Griffin and paleontologists Darlington Munyikwa and Michel Zondo of the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo unearthed a nearly complete skeleton. It turned out to be a new species of early dinosaur: Mbiresaurus raathi, which they describe today in Nature...
Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/i-ve-got-dinosaur-african-find-illuminates-dawn-dinos
Round One: Gnathovorax vs Mbiresaurus
Gnathovorax (left) or Mbiresaurus (right)?
Gnathovorax
Mbiresaurus
Factfiles:
Gnathovorax cabreirai
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Cabreira’s devouring jaw (in honour of the discoverer Dr. Sérgio Furtado Cabreira)
Time: 233.23 million years ago (Carnian stage of the Late Triassic)
Location: Santa Maria Formation, Brazil
Gnathovorax is a herrerasaurid dinosaur named in 2019, and we shoved it into the sauropodomorph section just so that we would have somewhere to put it. It’s known from an impressively complete skeleton with almost all bone elements represented, including a beautiful skull! It’s also the first herrerasaurid named in a long time, and its discovery has helped reignite the study of this weird group of guys. Where herrerasauridae fits into dinosauria is, simply put, A Mess. They had been considered the earliest theropods for decades, but more recent work like the kinda still controversial ornithoscelida hypothesis placed them as the sister group of sauropodomorphs, and further analyses even placed them outside of dinosaurs entirely! Thankfully, Gnathovorax seems to have helped resolve some of those issues with a new-new analysis of herrerasaurid relationships, that puts them as basal saurischians, neither sauropodomorphs or theropods.
Mbiresaurus raathi
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Raath’s reptile from Mbire (after the Mbire district of Zimbabwe, and in honour of palaeontologist and discoverer Michael Raath)
Time: ~ 230 million years ago (Carnian stage of the Late Triassic)
Location: Pebbly Arkose Formation, Zimbabwe
There was once a time… before titanosaurs… before diplodocids… before any sauropod… when sauropodomorphs were simply Just Some Little Guy. And that is where Mbiresaurus, oldest African dinosaur ever found, comes in!
Mbiresaurus was named in 2022 from Zimbabwe, and is the only dinosaur yet named from the Pebbly Arkose formation. It’s known from a beautifully complete skeleton that has all the features of a classic Early Dinosaur. It is small, has long gangly legs and arms, and a lil head with vaguely pointy kinda multipurpose teeth. The fact that all the wild diversity and enormous size of the sauropods came out of something like this is hard to imagine, but evolutionarily step by step these little scampery dudes would work their way up!
DMM Round One Masterpost
Round Two: Mbiresaurus vs Bagualosaurus
Mbiresaurus raathi
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Raath’s reptile from Mbire (after the Mbire district of Zimbabwe, and in honour of palaeontologist and discoverer Michael Raath)
Time: ~ 230 million years ago (Carnian stage of the Late Triassic)
Location: Pebbly Arkose Formation, Zimbabwe
There was once a time… before titanosaurs… before diplodocids… before any sauropod… when sauropodomorphs were simply Just Some Little Guy. And that is where Mbiresaurus, oldest African dinosaur ever found, comes in!
Mbiresaurus was named in 2022 from Zimbabwe, and is the only dinosaur yet named from the Pebbly Arkose formation. It’s known from a beautifully complete skeleton that has all the features of a classic Early Dinosaur. It is small, has long gangly legs and arms, and a lil head with vaguely pointy kinda multipurpose teeth. The fact that all the wild diversity and enormous size of the sauropods came out of something like this is hard to imagine, but evolutionarily step by step these little scampery dudes would work their way up!
Bagualosaurus agudoensis
Artwork by @i-draws-dinosaurs, written by @i-draws-dinosaurs
Name meaning: Strongly built reptile from Agudo (from regional usage of “bagual” in southern Brazil to mean a well built but crude person)
Time: ~230 million years ago (Carnian stage of the Late Triassic)
Location: Candelária sequence, Upper Santa Maria Formation, Brazil
Although most famous for their enormous size, the sauropodomorphs began as little scurrying bipeds like all other dinosaurs. It wasn’t long though before they started packing on the beef amd shooting for size and power, and Bagualosaurus marks the beginning of that shift. It was still small, only a little over 2 metres long, but its skeleton shows some of the first signs of bulking up, hence its name! Its legs in particular are more robust than the earliest sauropodomorphs, and its skull is starting to show similarities to later and larger Triassic sauropodomorphs like Plateosaurus. Bagualosaurus is the biggest dinosaur described from its ecosystem so far, but it was still very much in the shadow of larger reptiles and synapsids, with a lot of growing left to do!
Mbiresaurus or Bagualosaurus?
Mbiresaurus
Bagualosaurus