{"id":5000,"date":"2022-11-02T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-02T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=5000"},"modified":"2022-10-21T13:56:12","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T13:56:12","slug":"africas-dinosaur-discoveries-five-essential-reads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/africas-dinosaur-discoveries-five-essential-reads\/","title":{"rendered":"Africa\u2019s dinosaur discoveries: five essential reads"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n \n
\n Smile if you love dinosaurs as much as Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus loved being a carnivore.\n YuRi Photolife<\/span><\/span>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n\nNatasha Joseph<\/a>, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/span>\n\n

Few prehistoric creatures generate as much excitement and awe as dinosaurs. Whether it\u2019s the \u201ctyrant\u201d T-Rex or a slim-necked Brachiosaurus, people are fascinated by these creatures that dominated landscapes all over the world – including across the African continent – hundreds of millions of years ago.<\/p>\n\n

The dinosaurs are long gone (though we\u2019re still surrounded by their direct descendants, birds). But researchers are still hard at work piecing together the fossil record to create a fuller picture of how dinosaurs lived, walked, ate and raised their young. Their discoveries offer a glimpse into ancient landscapes, helping modern scientists to better understand today\u2019s climates and ecosystems.<\/p>\n\n

The Conversation Africa has showcased a number of dinosaur finds on the continent. Here are five essential reads:<\/p>\n\n

A rich record<\/h2>\n\n

Africa is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of humankind. But less attention is paid to its incredibly varied fossil record. Many of the planet\u2019s most important life forms originated on the continent: bacteria-like organisms; many dinosaur species and, of course, primates \u2013 including humans. Even the rocks on the continent are among the oldest in the world. Some of them date back more than three billion years.<\/p>\n\n

That\u2019s what prompted Julien Benoit to create a syllabus for his palaeontology students that centred African fossil discoveries rather than focusing on finds from elsewhere in the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hidden in plain sight<\/h2>\n\n

Many museums and universities keep extensive fossil collections. Their contents have been studied, labelled and catalogued. Sometimes, however, they hold secrets that can only be uncovered through a combination of scientific hunch and cutting-edge technology. That\u2019s how Kimberley E.J. Chapelle discovered and described an entirely new species: Ngwevu intloko<\/em> (\u201cgrey skull\u201d in isiXhosa).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A giant African dinosaur<\/h2>\n\n

Researchers are constantly rewriting the fossil record thanks to new discoveries. Dinosaurs\u2019 fossilised footprints are a useful tool for this work, as evidenced by a \u2013 literally \u2013 gigantic find in Lesotho. <\/p>\n\n

It was previously thought that ancient southern African landscapes were dominated by small and agile two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods. But Lara Sciscio and her colleagues\u2019 study in Lesotho unexpectedly revealed that very large carnivorous dinosaurs with an estimated body length of between 8 and 9 metres (or 26 feet) \u2013 that\u2019s a two-storey building or two adult rhinos nose to tail \u2013 lived in the region too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Footprint finds<\/h2>\n\n

Still on the subject of footprints, it turns out that fossilised dinosaur prints hold incredible detail about more than just the size and shape of the creature that made them. As Miengah Abrahams explains, they can reveal what organism made the tracks \u2013 different animals have different footprint shapes. They offer clues to the creature\u2019s behaviour and may even contain evidence of what sort of environment dinosaurs roamed \u2013 did they sink into wet sand, or were they standing firmly on dry gravel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A toothy morsel<\/h2>\n\n

Moving from feet to teeth: dinosaurs\u2019 chompers hold important clues to their lives, diets and how they moved across landscapes. That\u2019s why Femke Holwerda ventured to the Kem Kem beds, a geological formation in North Africa, to seek out fossil dinosaur teeth. Her discoveries allowed her to create a fuller picture of the long-necked, plant-eating (herbivorous) dinosaurs, called sauropods, from the Early Cretaceous period of North Africa.\"The<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Natasha Joseph<\/a>, Commissioning Editor, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Smile if you love dinosaurs as much as Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus loved being a carnivore. YuRi Photolife Natasha Joseph,…\n","protected":false},"author":250,"featured_media":4966,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[485,29,25,474],"class_list":{"0":"post-5000","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nature","8":"tag-africa","9":"tag-dinosaur","10":"tag-paleontology","11":"tag-the-conversation","12":"cs-entry","13":"cs-video-wrap"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5001,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5000\/revisions\/5001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}