Search Extinct Animals
Search Extinct Animals
Though many massive dinosaurs have lived in Mesozoic Africa, the fossils of their much smaller ancestors are most abundant on this continent. In this vein, the most important discovery is of the Vulcanodon, a relatively small herbivore. It occupied an intermediate position between the earliest prosauropods of the Triassic and early Jurassic periods and the giant sauropods and titanosaurs of the late Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
During the early part of the Late Cretaceous, North Africa has rich dinosaur fauna in the form of Carcharodontosaurus, Spinosaurus, Ouranosaurus, and Paralititan. The oldest African dinosaur was the Mbiresaurus raathi, that lived more than 230 million years ago. Its fossil was unearthed in Zimbabwe, South Africa, in 2017-2019.
The almost complete skeleton of the Mbiresaurus raathi is kept in the Natural History Museum in Bulawayo, a southern city of Zimbabwe. The Karoo Basin in South Africa and Lesotho has ample dinosaur footprints from 220-183 million years ago, belonging to the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic period.