One of the largest dinosaur footprints found in Lesotho
Picture : Steinmann
A large carnivorous dinosaur once walked across southern Africa some 200 million years ago, a team of researchers has concluded after discovering a large footprint in Lesotho.
The dinosaur, named Kayentapus ambrokholohali, was 2.7-metres high and nine-metres long making it one of the largest dinosaurs to ever roam the continent, researchers said in the Plos One Journal published earlier this week.
Lara Sciscio, a postdoctoral research fellow in Geological Sciences at the University of Cape Town, and lead writer of the journal article, described the finding as “unprecedented” and “unexpected”.
“This discovery means that there are only two sites in the world where such large carnivorous dinosaurs were found as far back as 200 million years ago – Poland and now Lesotho.
Fabien Knoll, a senior research fellow at The School of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Oxford, and one of the members of the UCT-led team, said the discovery was a departure from established understanding of the types of dinosaurs that existed during the early Jurassic period 200 million years ago.
Until this discovery, theropods – or large carnivorous two-legged dinosaurs – were thought to be considerably smaller during the Early Jurassic. They were roughly three to five metres in body length whereas this dinosaur would have been nine-metres long.
It is only during the Cretaceous, considerably more recent at 145 million years ago, that larger theropods, such as the more widely known Tyrannosaurus rex, are represented in fossil records.
“This is an important discovery because the footprints found were the biggest of their epoch [Early Jurassic] in the whole of Gondwana [the prehistoric continent that later broke up to become Africa and other continents],
the footprint shows that the dinosaur was two metres longer than the Cryolophosaurus, which is itself the largest Early Jurassic theropod known from skeletal remains.
Researchers found the footprint during a field trip in the Roma Valley near the National University of Lesotho in early 2016. They returned through the year to conduct tests and establish the date of the fossil footprint, which culminated in the report published in Plos One Journal.
The study, led by University of Cape Town researchers, said the creature “would have roamed a landscape otherwise dominated by much smaller carnivorous dinosaurs and a variety of herbivorous and omnivorous dinosaurs”.
Source : ALJAZEERA
Geology :
A palaeosurface with one megatheropod trackway and several theropod tracks and trackways from the Lower Jurassic upper Elliot Formation (Stormberg Group, Karoo Supergroup) in western Lesotho is described. The majority of the theropod tracks are referable to either Eubrontes or Kayentapus based on their morphological characteristics. The larger megatheropod tracks are 57 cm long and have no Southern Hemisphere equivalent. Morphologically, they are more similar to the Early Jurassic Kayentapus, as well as the much younger Upper Cretaceous ichnogenus Irenesauripus, than to other contemporaneous ichnogenera in southern Africa. Herein they have been placed within the ichnogenus Kayentapus and described as a new ichnospecies (Kayentapus ambrokholohali). The tracks are preserved on ripple marked, very fine-grained sandstone of the Lower Jurassic upper Elliot Formation, and thus were made after the end-Triassic mass extinction event (ETE). This new megatheropod trackway site marks the first occurrence of very large carnivorous dinosaurs (estimated body length >8–9 meters) in the Early Jurassic of southern Gondwana, an evolutionary strategy that was repeatedly pursued and amplified in the following ~135 million years, until the next major biotic crisis at the end-Cretaceous.
The Roma Valley itself is carved into the Lower Jurassic successions of the upper Stromberg and lower Drakensberg Groups of the Karoo Supergroup (Fig 1B). The valley floor and sides expose the sedimentary rocks of the upper Elliot and Clarens formations, whereas the hilltops are often capped by Karoo continental flood basalts that were dated at 183±1.0 Ma [23]. Outcrops of the older, Triassic-age rocks (e.g., Molteno and lower Elliot formations) are scarce and limited to the westernmost part of the valley, while mafic dolerite intrusions (also part of the Drakensberg Group) are relatively common.
Source : https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185941
Task :
1. Go to the Location and make a Picture with the Footprints and your GPS
2. Look closely at the footprint and estimate the length of the greatest extent
Picture : Steinmann
3. Question : which type of rock can be seen predominantly at the location?
Send my the Answers to my Massage Center or via Email , you can log the Cache immediately .
If there any Problem i will mail you !! enjoy the Landscape and nice people !
>
