A small boy’s excitement at finding a card displaying a dinosaur in a box of cereal had a remarkable ending on Thursday when the boy, now a 31-year-old palaeontologist, presented a new species to the South African media.
Dr Adam Yates unveiled Antetonitrus ingenipes at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research on Wednesday morning. It is the world’s oldest known sauropod — a 215-million-year-old dinosaur.
”I was thrilled. It’s not every day you get to name a new dinosaur,” said the Australian of his discovery.
Yates chose the name Antetonitrus ingenipes for this sauropod — a group of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs — and means ”Before the thunder”.
He explained that the humongous Brontosaurus — between 40m and 50m long and around 100 tons — is the best-known sauropod, and its name translates to ”Thunder Lizard”. To put it very simply Antetonitrus is Brontosaurus’s younger brother, hence the name.
He explained that he found Antetonitrus when he came to Wits in 2001 while a postdoctoral research assistant at England’s University of Bristol.
”It couldn’t have been easier, to be honest. They [the fossil bones] were lying there on [a shelf].”
They had been there since the man who dug them up in 1973 — Professor James Kitching, now 81, had left them there because he ”wasn’t interested in dinosaurs”.
Kitching and Yates have published a scientific paper on Antetonitrus in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences.
”When I saw all the bones at once I thought, ‘My God, it’s a big one’,” said Yates. He spent a week studying, photographing, drawing and measuring the monster bones.
Asked when he realised this was a new species he said: ”There is not one, ‘Bingo, this is it’ moment. It’s a summing up of factors.”
Antetonitrus’s defining features are in the humerus [the bone of the upper arm or forelimb], and the bones found belong to two juveniles. The skeleton shown to reporters in Johannesburg on Thursday belonged to the bigger juvenile, the owner of the most complete skeleton.
These skeletons are the only two in the world.
Yates, however, feels there is more to be found at the site in the Karoo at which Kitching and Lucas Huma found the bones in 1973.
”There is a very big possibility of more bones at the site. We went there a few weeks ago and a shoulder bone was found …it could well belong to Antetonitrus,” he said.
He also feels South Africa is a rich picking ground.
”This is by no means the last significant dinosaur to come out of the Karoo.” – Sapa