The Dinosaur that did its own Thing

 

Some 200 million years ago in what’s now South Africa, a dinosaur that weighed as much as two adult African elephants wandered over the landscape. This colossal herbivore got so big in a unique way, and it had a and even more independent way of standing on all fours.

 

The new dinosaur, looks like a sauropod, the group of classic long-necked dinosaurs that includes dinosaurs that look like Brontosaurus, (Brontosaurus technically isn’t a sauropod but you get the message). Instead, Ledumahadi is an earlier, more distant cousin called a sauropodomorph. It is a much bigger animal living much earlier in the age of dinosaurs than researchers normally expect to see, so its discoverers etched their surprise into the dinosaur’s name: Ledumahadi mafube, Southern Sotho for “a giant thunderclap [at] dawn.”

Like elephants, true sauropods had column-like limbs that efficiently supported the animals’ weight. But Ledumahadi took a decidedly different approach. It seems to have had a more mobile forelimb, but it stood in a less efficient catlike crouch, with knees and elbows partly flexed.

“This was the animal that wanted to have everything,” says lead study author Blair McPhee, a paleontologist at the University of São Paulo, (Argentina). “It wanted to be really big, like a sauropod, and wanted to walk predominantly quadrupedally, like a sauropod. But when it came to relinquishing that primitive mobile forelimb, it didn’t want to do that.”

This only gives us more information on the evolution of sauropods, showing that some of the key adaptations where evolved sooner than previously thought.

Hector Bowering