Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew

by John Pickrell

Massospondylus from South Africa was one of the very first dinosaurs named, by Richard Owen at the Natural History Museum in London in 1854. But South Africa is a location where many new Early Jurassic discoveries are now being made, the work spearheaded by Jonah Choiniere at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. These include 10 nests of possible Massospondylus eggs found in a cliff at the Golden Gate Highlands National Park of the eastern Free State, which, at 190 million years old, may be the oldest dinosaur nests ever found.4 In 2015, a new sauropodomorph dinosaur, a relative of Massospondylus, was named Sefapanosaurus (meaning ‘cross lizard’, in reference to the shape of its ankle, in the Sesotho language of Zastron region in which it was found).5 Further north in Africa, in Tanzania, a giant titanosaur sauropod called Rukwatitan bisepultus was described by palaeontologists including Ohio University’s Eric Gorscak in 2015.6 The finding added to the handful of titanosaurs found so far on the African mainland. ‘Much of what we know regarding titanosaurian evolutionary history stems from numerous discoveries in South America – a continent that underwent a steady separation from Africa during the first half of the Cretaceous Period’, Gorscak told reporters. ‘With the discovery of Rukwatitan and study of the material in nearby Malawi, we are beginning to fill a significant gap from a large part of the world.’