Johannesburg - For years, palaeontologists at Wits University thought the bones they had at their evolutionary centre belonged to the Aardonyx dinosaur.
But a chance discovery revealed the bones are in fact of a new species of dinosaur.
University of Cape Town PhD student Emil Krupandan and Dr Alejandro Otero from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina were visiting the Evolutionary Studies Institute’s (ESI) collections to look at early sauropodomorph dinosaurs when they noticed bones that were distinctive from the other dinosaurs they were studying.
Krupandan was working on a dinosaur from Lesotho when he realised the material he was looking at was different to the Aardonyx. The specimen was found in the late 1930s in the Zastron area in the Free State, about 30km from the Lesotho border. It has formed part of the largest fossil collection in South Africa at Wits University’s ESI.
After Krupandan’s and Otero’s discovery, further research was conducted and it was found that they were a new dinosaur, estimated to be 200 million-years-old. The dinosaur was named Sefapanosaurus after the Sesotho word sefapano, meaning cross. The name was because one of its ankle bones, the astragalus, is shaped like a cross.
Dr Jonah Choiniere, a senior researcher in dinosaur palaeobiology at the ESI, said: “Wits has a big collection of these fossils. This just shows that as much as we have to go to the field, we also have to go through our existing collection and do further research. We once believed there were only two species of dinosaur in the Karoo but we now have evidence that there were lots of species. This is another piece of the puzzle.”
Choiniere said studying dinosaurs could help us deal with extinction. “More than 200 million years ago, over 50 percent of species became extinct in a short space of time.
“Studying the dinosaurs shows us how they coped and can help us with ways to respond to our own extinction. They can give us a model of extinction and help us understand the future.” he said.
The Star