New Titanosaur from Tanazania

It seems the Paleontological world is abuzz with new Titanosaur species being discovered the last few months.

The first, Dreadnoughtus Schrani, a new contender for the largest dinosaur to ever roam our little blue planet. The newest addition?

Rukwatitan bisepultus; a giant from the Tanazania region of Africa.

This find yielded some suprising features for the group - features unique to this species..

"Using both traditional and new computational approaches, we were able to place the new species within the family tree of sauropod dinosaurs and determine both its uniqueness as a species and to delineate others species with which it is most closely related," said lead author Eric Gorscak

Rukwatitan appears to be a rather basal Titanosaur, somewhat close morphilogically to  Malawisaurus dixeyi, But generally is more 'robust' from what i can tell then the latter.

Other species recovered from the Rukwa Rift Basin seem to be slightly dissimilar to their counterparts found else where in Africa. Co-author on this new species, Patrick O'connor, had this to say

"There may have been certain environmental features, such as deserts, large waterways and/or mountain ranges, that would have limited the movement of animals and promoted the evolution of regionally distinct faunas;Only additional data on the faunas and paleo environments from around the continent will let us further test such hypotheses."  

They brought the fossils out of their Millenia emtombed in  in the Rukwa Rift Basin - hence the species name - , somewhere in southern Tanzania. The find brought up  ~35 - 40% of the animal, more then enough to distinguish between a new species or not.

Scale bar = 1 meter

Rukwatitan, as the family name suggests, is a rather large that animal that lived 100 mya. The titanosaurs were some of the last sauropods to walk our earth, easily outliving the dipolodocoids and Brachiosaurs. What lead to their sucess while other, morphilogically similar sauropod families vanished into extinction.

Theories suggest Titanosaurs simply had a better feeding apparatus, simply ate more, or outcompeted the other saurpod families. The last is the most likely, Imo.

The find is rather significant, not only because it's a large basal Titanosaur, but out of the thirty or so species found over the globe, 4 found to date resided in Africa.

"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 said. "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."

Have any more info on this guy? leave it down below!