Musankwa sanyatiensis is one of the greatest monstrous creatures of the Triassic period—the dawn of the “age of monsters.”
According to SciTech Daily, an incomplete fossil of an unprecedented monster in the paleontological record has been found in Triassic rocks in the Mid-Zambezi Basin of Zimbabwe.
A thigh bone of the Triassic monster exposed in rock. (Photo: Paul Barrett).
Professor Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum in London (UK), along with colleagues from the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, and Stony Brook University (USA), identified this as a completely new dinosaur species.
Describing this monster in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, the authors noted that Sauropodomorpha, a group of long-necked, bipedal dinosaurs, began to increase in number during the late Triassic.
Sauropodomorpha is a large dinosaur clade that includes the Sauropod family, which consists of the largest dinosaurs to ever roam the continents.
While the members of this clade that weighed tens of tons were most common in the much later Cretaceous period, the new species from Zimbabwe, weighing about 390 kg when alive, was one of the largest dinosaurs of the Triassic.
This is significant because the Triassic is considered the “dawn” of dinosaurs, with early species being relatively small, even as tiny as a gecko.
Larger species began to emerge in the subsequent Jurassic period before entering the golden age of the Cretaceous.
The new species has been named Musankwa sanyatiensis, inspired by the name Musankwa of the mobile laboratory-boat used by the excavation team.
Despite being large compared to other animals of its time, it was still a gentle herbivore like its later descendants.
Musankwa sanyatiensis (standing) in a sketch by the research team – (Photo: Atashni Moopen).
This new discovery enriches the fascinating story of the earliest dinosaur world in Africa.
These include some of the oldest dinosaurs like Nyasasaurus parringtoni from Tanzania and Mbiresaurus raathi from Zimbabwe, as well as rich dinosaur populations from South Africa, Tanzania, Niger, and Morocco.
Musankwa sanyatiensis also represents a “lost world” of the Triassic, as it existed close to the mass extinction that occurred at the end of this period, before the biological explosion that happened 200 million years ago, marking the beginning of the Jurassic.
