- Nineteen prisoners use cutlery to break out of cells at Winchester prison
- France wants progress in Ukraine before Russia returns to G7
- Italy president begins talks to seek way out of government crisis
- Italian PM expected to resign as political chaos deepens
- Russia says US cruise missile test ‘regrettable’
- Kremlin - No date set for Normandy talks on Ukraine despite Macron meeting
- Egypt court hands out 6 death sentences on terror charges
- Putin says Russian nuclear explosion poses no threat
- Russian panel eyes alleged foreign interference in protests
- Gran Canaria wildfire triggers evacuation of thousands of people
- PM Johnson calls on Germany and France to compromise on Brexit
- Sudan's ex-president Bashir arrives at corruption trial
TEHRAN, August 7 -Researchers in South Africa have discovered a new species of dinosaur. The newly named dino remains had been laying misidentified in storage collections for three decades.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -"This is a new dinosaur that has been hiding in plain sight," Paul Barrett, researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a news release. "The specimen has been in the collections in Johannesburg for about 30 years, and lots of other scientists have already looked at it. But they all thought that it was simply an odd example of Massospondylus."
Kimberley Chapelle, a doctoral student at the University of the Witwatersrand, working under Barrett, suspected the remains represented a new species. Analysis by Chapelle and her research partners determined the dinosaur fossil was unique enough to warrant not only a new species designation, but also a new genus.
Scientists named the new species of sauropodomorph Ngwevu intloko, which translates as "grey skull" in the Xhosa, the language spoken by the Xhosa people, a native tribe in South Africa. Researchers described the new species this week in the journal PeerJ.
"In order to be certain that a fossil belongs to a new species, it is crucial to rule out the possibility that it is a younger or older version of an already existing species," Chapelle said. "This is a difficult task to accomplish with fossils because it is rare to have a complete age series of fossils from a single species."
"Luckily, the most common South African dinosaur Massospondylus has specimens ranging from embryo to adult," she said. "Based on this, we were able to rule out age as a possible explanation for the differences we observed in the specimen."
Analysis of the near-complete fossil suggests the newly named species was stocky and walked on two legs. A long, slender neck attached its boxy head to its chunky body. The sauropodomorph stretched nearly ten feet in length. Researchers suspect the species ate both plants and small animals.
The discovery suggests the evolving ecosystems of the late Triassic and early Jurassic periods were more diverse than previously thought.
"This new species is interesting, because we thought previously that there was really only one type of sauropodomorph living in South Africa at this time," Barrett said. "We now know there were actually six or seven of these dinosaurs in this area, as well as variety of other dinosaurs from less common groups. It means that their ecology was much more complex than we used to think. Some of these other sauropodomorphs were like Massospondylus, but a few were close to the origins of true sauropods, if not true sauropods themselves."
Source: upi
Your Comment