New Fossil nicknamed "Giant Thunderclap at Dawn" shows how Big Dinos has gone from two to four Smart News

"Giant thunderbolt at dawn" – that's what the last scientific name of the dinosaur family means in the local South African language, sesotho. And the new child on the prehistoric block, Ledumahadi mafube, certainly lives up to the title, as the researchers described it today in the journal Current Biology.

The biggest dinosaurs to have crossed the earth were the titanosaurs, which reached their peak of gigantic about 145 million years ago. But these mega-lizards had to evolve from somewhere. Michael Greshko said the new dino from South Africa, recently revealed, was not always simple. National Geographic.

Unlike sauropod dinosaurs, including titanosaurs and classical brontosaurus, which all had four straight legs and a long neck, Ledumahadi is an anterior relative called a sauropodomorph. Weighing the equivalent of two elephants, the animal had limbs that flexed more than its subsequent cousins, as well as flexible, mobile fore-limbs, giving it a cat-shaped squatting and a single gait.

The first dinosaurs were all bipeds, and moved on two hind legs using their front legs to catch eggs in nests or catch prey. But as the size of the dinosaurs increased, the need for more stability and weight distribution also increased, eventually leading to large four-legged animals such as triceratops and diplodocus in the Jurassic period. Ledumahadi is one of the species appeared during the transition period from two to four legs.

"It was the animal that wanted to have everything," said lead author Greshko, Blair McPhee, of the University of São Paulo. "He wanted to be really tall, like a sauropod, and wanted to walk mainly by quadruped, like a sauropod. But when it came to giving up this first primitive mobile member, he did not want to do it. "

according to A press release, it was not obvious at first whether Ledumahadi actually walked on all fours or used mainly his hind legs. To understand this, the researchers measured the size of the animal's limbs and compared them to the amount of weight that can be carried by other modern dinosaurs and animals. The results suggest that the animal worked well on all fours to support its weight and that this massive size was possible among the ancestors and cousins ​​of the future giant sauropods. It also shows that the path to the titanosaurs was messy.

"This tells us that different groups of dinosaurs were experimenting with different ways to become big … before the true sauropods reached their gallows form perfectly suited to monstrous size," says paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the University of California. # 39; Edinburgh. not involved in the study, says Hannah Osborne to Newsweek. "And that 's what allowed them to become the greatest animals to ever have lived on Earth in the history of Earth – some of them being bigger than the Boeing 737s.

It turns out that sauropodomorphs have developed four-legged postures at least twice before developing the brentosaur right-hand limbs we are familiar with today.

"It means that the four-legged walk is the first, before the really big size, and it took time for quadruped locomotion to be perfect," University co-author Jonah Choiniere told Osborne. of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

LedumahadiThe pathway between the soil in South Africa and the science rooms was also complex. Greshko to National Geographic reports that the fossil was discovered around 1990 by a paleontologist working with the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. He collected the bones coming out of a cliff, but was more interested in ancient mammals. The fossils remained intact at the University of Witswatersrand until the mid-2000s, when paleontologist Adam Yates acknowledged their potential significance. Yates and his colleagues found the place where the fossils were originally excavated and dug further fossils between 2012 and 2017.

In the statement, Choiniere said that this discovery and other recent discoveries show that South Africa was once a flourishing dinosaur ecosystem and that paleontologists deserve to be better considered.

"Africa, and especially South Africa, is known for its great game," he says. "I think we should be just as famous for our great game of the early Mesozoic, 200 million years ago.

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