It will also make it possible to answer other unknowns, such as which animals lived on the continent and with which species they were most closely related.
As far as the final days of the dinosaurs are concerned, Africa is like a blank page. So far, Cretaceous fossils found in Africa are few and far between, in time and space. That means that the course of the evolution of the dinosaurs that inhabited this region is a mystery. But that's changing. A recent study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, describes a new species of dinosaur, found in the Egyptian part of the Sahara Desert, which will help to fill in the blank pages. It is a long-necked herbivore, with bony plaques embedded in the skin that they have baptized: Mansourasaurus shahinae.
The fossilized remains of Mansourasaurus were unearthed by an expedition led by the Vertebrate Palaeontology initiative of the University of Mansoura (MUVP) and led by Hesham Sallam.
This is a fundamental discovery for Egyptian and African paleontology,"says study co-author Eric Gorscak in a statement. Africa remains an unknown question and the Mansourasaurus helps us to answer questions about the fossil record and paleobiology of the continent: what animals lived there and what species were they most closely related to?”.
One of the great difficulties in finding dinosaur fossils from the Upper Cretaceous in Africa is that much of the land where the remains are located is covered with lush vegetation, instead of being on the exposed rock as it is in the Rocky Mountains, the Gobi Desert or Patagonia.
For much of the Triassic and Jurassic periods, the continents were united and formed the supercontinent Pangea. However, throughout the Cretaceous Period, the continents began to separate and change to the current configuration. What is not known is to what extent the animals of Africa were isolated from their neighbours and evolved differently. Mansourasaurus, one of the few known African dinosaurs of this period, will also answer this question.
This dinosaur belongs to the group of titanosaurus, the same to which belong the largest terrestrial animals, such as the Argentinosaurus. The mansourasaurus, however, was of moderate size, approximately the weight of an African elephant. It has preserved parts of the skull, lower jaw, neck and back, ribs, most of the shoulder and anterior limb, part of the back foot and sections of the dermal plates.