Baptized with the poetic name of "a giant thunder at dawn", Ledumahadi Mafube in sesotho language, experts have described a new species of sauropod dinosaur, found in South Africa, where it lived 200 million years ago and was a close relative and ancestor of the brontosaurus. The remains found belong to an adult specimen, about 14 years old, and may have weighed about 12,000 kilos, according to a study published by Current Biology. The new dinosaur walked predominantly on all fours, thus anticipating, during the Jurassic, the displacement system that would later perfect the brontosaurus and his fellow humans. One of the authors of the study, Jonah Choiniere of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, pointed out that this finding shows that "200 million years ago, these animals had become the largest vertebrates that have walked the Earth. Choiniere said, in a statement, that understanding the biology of these animals using only fossil records "is extremely difficult," so they used other methods to discover some of their characteristics. In this way, to determine if he walked on two legs, like his predecessors, or on four, they developed a method using measurements of current animals and measuring the thickness of the dinosaur's extremities to infer its weight and how many legs would have held that weight. Thus, the results suggest not only that the Ledumahadi mafube was quadruped, but that many other early sauropods were "experienced" in the art of four-legged walking, which had arisen from species that moved only with their hind legs. Choiniere said that the evolution of sauropods is not as simple as we thought. In addition, according to the expert, these findings show that millions of years before the tyrannosaurus or velocirpator appeared in the northern hemisphere, there was already "a prosperous ecosystem of dinosaurs in South Africa," where "12-ton giants like the Ledumahadi, tiny canivores like the megapnosaurus, and the first mammals lived.
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January 2019
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