Appeared 230 million years ago .. The discovery of the oldest dinosaur in Africa

Scientists in Zimbabwe announced yesterday the discovery of the remains of the oldest dinosaur in Africa that roamed the Earth about 230 million years ago.

The international team of paleontologists that made this discovery explained that the dinosaur "Meperisaurus hereditary" was only about one meter long, weighed up to 30 kilograms, and had a long tail.

"It walked on two legs and had a small head," Christopher Griffin, the scientist who discovered this dinosaur's first bone, told AFP on Thursday.

It is likely that this dinosaur was a carnivore that feeds on plants, small animals and insects.

Griffin, a researcher at Yale University, pointed out that the dinosaur belonged to the family Sauropodomorph, the same subspecies that later included the giant long-necked dinosaurs.

A team of researchers from Zimbabwe, Zambia and the United States found the skeleton of the dinosaur during two expeditions in 2017 and 2019.

"I dug up the femur and knew then that it was a dinosaur and that I had grabbed the oldest known dinosaur fossil from Africa," added Griffin, who was then a doctoral student at Virginia Tech.

His team's findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The remains of dinosaurs from the same period have only been found in South America and India.

The Zimbabwean paleontologists chose to do their work after calculating that when all the continents were connected by a single landmass known as Pangea, they were at about the same latitude as the areas where earlier discoveries were made in modern South America.

"Mpirisaurus is genetically remarkably similar to some dinosaurs of the same age found in Brazil and Argentina, which reinforces the fact that South America and Africa were part of a continuous land mass," said Max Langer of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

The dinosaur was named after the Ember region in northeastern Zimbabwe, where the skeleton was found, and paleontologist Michael Rath, who first reported the fossils in this region.