New dinosaur identified in South Africa

Damn, why cant I make a find like this?????

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) -- The remains of a two-ton dinosaur have lurked in a South African university for more than 20 years -- but only now have researchers realized it is the oldest direct ancestor of the largest creatures ever to walk the earth.

Scientists said Thursday that the fossil, dug up in 1981, was the earliest known example of a sauropod, the group of giant plant-eating reptiles that ruled the Jurassic world between 205 and 145 million years ago.

The fossil is 215 million years old, and represents a new species of sauropod that would have been the largest land animal of its time, weighing 1.8 tons and stretching 26 to 33 feet from nose to tail.

www.cnn.com...

Interesting, but how would they know that it's length was 26 to 33 feet in length if there was only one skeleton discovered? Don't they need other skeletons in order to determine this?

Damn I thought this post was about Bushs recent visit to Africa....nevermind..interesting though

Bush? That would have been new dumb@$$ found in South Africa.

Anyways, cool. New dino, so who knows how many more dino skeletons there are, and how many will be the first of their kind to be found.

interesting. i've always liked dinosaurs. It's really exciting when I new species is found.

originally posted by: dragonrider
Damn, why cant I make a find like this?????

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) -- The remains of a two-ton dinosaur have lurked in a South African university for more than 20 years -- but only now have researchers realized it is the oldest direct ancestor of the largest creatures ever to walk the earth.

Scientists said Thursday that the fossil, dug up in 1981, was the earliest known example of a sauropod, the group of giant plant-eating reptiles that ruled the Jurassic world between 205 and 145 million years ago.

The fossil is 215 million years old, and represents a new species of sauropod that would have been the largest land animal of its time, weighing 1.8 tons and stretching 26 to 33 feet from nose to tail.

www.cnn.com...

The fossil in question was originally considered a specimen of the Triassic sauropodomorph Euskelosaurus from South Africa, but when work by Adam Yates beginning in the early 2000s showed that a number of specimens previously assigned to that genus were different taxa, the specimen found in 1981 was christened Antetonitrus ingenipes.

Yates, A.M., and Kitching, J.W., 2003. The earliest known sauropod dinosaur and the first steps towards sauropod locomotion. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 270 (1525): 1753–1758. doi:10.1098/rspb.2003.2417. PMC 1691423. PMID 12965005.