A New Titanosaur Species discovered in Egypt: Mansourasaurus shahinae.
Mansourasaurus shahinae, was a type of titanosaur-sauropod (long-necked plant-eating) dinosaurs which roamed Earth around 80 million years ago during Cretaceous period.
Prominent hypotheses advanced over the past two decades have sought to
characterize the Late Cretaceous continental vertebrate
palaeobiogeography of Gondwanan landmasses, but have proved difficult to
test because terrestrial vertebrates from the final ~30 million years
of the Mesozoic are extremely rare and fragmentary on continental Africa
(including the then-conjoined Arabian Peninsula but excluding the
island of Madagascar). Here we describe a new titanosaurian sauropod
dinosaur, Mansourasaurus shahinae gen. et sp. nov., from the
Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Quseir Formation of the Dakhla Oasis of the
Egyptian Western Desert. Represented by an associated partial skeleton
that includes cranial elements, Mansourasaurus is the most
completely preserved land-living vertebrate from the post-Cenomanian
Cretaceous (~94–66 million years ago) of the African continent.
Phylogenetic analyses demonstrate that Mansourasaurus is nested
within a clade of penecontemporaneous titanosaurians from southern
Europe and eastern Asia, thereby providing the first unambiguous
evidence for a post-Cenomanian Cretaceous continental vertebrate clade
that inhabited both Africa and Europe. The close relationship of Mansourasaurus
to coeval Eurasian titanosaurians indicates that terrestrial vertebrate
dispersal occurred between Eurasia and northern Africa after the
tectonic separation of the latter from South America ~100 million years
ago. These findings counter hypotheses that dinosaur faunas of the
African mainland were completely isolated during the post-Cenomanian
Cretaceous.
Image credit: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Ref & abstract credit : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0455-5