Scientists unearth 80-million year old dinosaur fossil in Sahara desert - Archaeology - Haaretz.com

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Scientists Unearth 80-million Year Old Dinosaur Fossil in Sahara Desert

Said to have been the size of a school bus, the discovery sheds light on mysterious time period of dinosaurs in Africa

Reuters

Jan 30, 2018 4:11 PM

Bloomberg Best of the Year 2017: A pedestrian walks past a mural showing dinosaurs on a wall outside the Fukui station in Fukui, Japan, on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2017.בלומברג

Scientists have unearthed in a Sahara Desert oasis in Egypt fossils of a long-necked, four-legged, school bus-sized dinosaur that lived roughly 80 million years ago, a discovery that sheds light on a mysterious time period in the history of dinosaurs in Africa.

Researchers said on Monday the plant-eating Cretaceous Period dinosaur, named Mansourasaurus shahinae, was nearly 33 feet (10 meters) long and weighed 5.5 tons (5,000 kg) and was a member of a group called titanosaurs that included Earth's largest-ever land animals. Like many titanosaurs, Mansourasaurus boasted bony plates called osteoderms embedded in its skin.

Mansourasaurus, which lived near the shore of the ancient ocean that preceded the Mediterranean Sea, is one of the very few dinosaurs known from the last 15 million years of the Mesozoic Era, or age of dinosaurs, on mainland Africa. Madagascar had a separate geologic history.

Its remains, found at the Dakhla Oasis in central Egypt, are the most complete of any mainland African land vertebrate during an even larger time span, the roughly 30 million years before the dinosaur mass extinction 66 million years ago, said paleontologist Hesham Sallam of Egypt's Mansoura University, who led the study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

A skeletal reconstruction of the Mansourasaurus shahinae from the Late Cretaceous of the Dakhla Oasis, Egypt, is pictured in this undated handout image obtained by Reuters on January 29, 2018.HANDOUT (Reuters)

The scientists recovered parts of its skull, lower jaw, neck and back vertebrae, ribs, shoulder and forelimb, back foot and osteoderms.

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