New DRAGON found out of place and time
I love to hike the Drakensberg or "dragon mountains" for the obvious reasons that can be seen in the pictures below.
Aside from its pristine beauty and majestic splendor it is also place with rich diversity in geology.
No wonder those who named these mountains thought dragons would live there.
Well, recently a new and scientifically significant "dragon" was discovered there.
We all know Tyrannosaurus rex or T-rex but he is rather young geologically and was surrounded by other giants.
Now a much older giant carnivore has been discovered in the drakensberg rocks that is about 128 million years older than T-rex. At this time in this part of the world the dinos were only around 3 to 5m in length.
This new guy is estimated to have been 8 to 9 meters (or 26 feet). There is only one other report of such a large carnivorous dinosaur present at the same time and that is a world away from Poland.
We don't have any body fossils yet just a set of very large footprints, so now the hunt is on to find some bones.
The new species has been named Kayentapus ambrokholohali
For further details
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185941
Thats crazy! The only other dinosaur that I have even heard of being in Southern Africa is the Lesothosaurus. I remember doing a junior school project on it in grade 3.
You can check out more info about it here -
http://dinosaurpictures.org/Lesothosaurus-pictures
Wow, that is an exciting new find. And those mountains are spectacular!
I read the same about this new species and it is very important that the traces found belong to the era of the early Jurassic period, since it was previously believed that at that time there were no large dinosaurs. The find confirmed that they were. I hope that the scientists will find all the remains of the dinosaurs and we will be able to find out what they were like.
It's really amazing. I've read your post and I've been feeling incredibly excited. I've loved this stuff a lot since a little. Thank you for remembering me.
@gavvet
Yup, it expands the boundaries of the science of paleontology for sure.
yeahh i love these kinds of stories.. dragons and archaology.. someday we will find the egg and we have a living dragon again..
We have found eggs, but they have long since turned to stone
Too bad.. imagine we could see a real one once in our life.. i would book my travel to south Afrika today. Thx for your reply. Regards
I agree with you, hiking is very interesting. Just think a man. I don't ever seen the fossil of dinosaur. Very interesting topic. Thanks a lot
Amazing!! The full extent of what the earth held in those times and even before then is yet to be known. Thanks @gavvet for the post. Hoping to see some bones soon!
I hope so too, although this slice of time has very little by way of preserved bones in this area.
@gavvet,
This is interesting! Definitely this is a huge discovery (research) has been done by them! I am very interesting about this subject! So, nice to see you are interesting about Dinos too! Thanks for sharing this great information with us! This Dino will write a new history, that's amazing!
Cheers~
@gavvet - It's a nice & good news Sir.... But I'm glad they lived before we born :) 9m huge carnivore is a bad dream for me Sir.... I like Jurassic World... So they got a new Dinosaurs for their next movie Sir :)
+W+ [UpVoted & ReSteemed]
... you just blew my mind, @gavvet. In all my years of hearing about dinosaurs, never once did it occur to me that they existed in Africa too. Now it makes me wonder how many fossils will never be found in Nigeria because all the people who could have studied paleontology are instead in medicine or at best "Oil and Gas" because all we care about is money 😔
This is in South Africa? Cool!
Lesotho, but close enough
Gavvet, how are ya? It's me Helen from the conference last year. Please find me on social media, I wanna get in touch. Thanks.