The remains of the newly named dino species had been sitting in museum storage collections in Johannesburg for 30 years. Photo by Kimberley Chapelle/Wits University
Aug. 6 (UPI) -- Researchers in South Africa have discovered a new species of dinosaur. The newly named dino remains had been laying misidentified in storage collections for three decades.
"This is a new dinosaur that has been hiding in plain sight," Paul Barrett, researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a news release. "The specimen has been in the collections in Johannesburg for about 30 years, and lots of other scientists have already looked at it. But they all thought that it was simply an odd example of Massospondylus."
Kimberley Chapelle, a doctoral student at the University of the Witwatersrand, working under Barrett, suspected the remains represented a new species. Analysis by Chapelle and her research partners determined the dinosaur fossil was unique enough to warrant not only a new species designation, but also a new genus.
Scientists named the new species of sauropodomorph Ngwevu intloko, which translates as "grey skull" in the Xhosa, the language spoken by the Xhosa people, a native tribe in South Africa. Researchers described the new species this week in the journal PeerJ.
"In order to be certain that a fossil belongs to a new species, it is crucial to rule out the possibility that it is a younger or older version of an already existing species," Chapelle said. "This is a difficult task to accomplish with fossils because it is rare to have a complete age series of fossils from a single species."
"Luckily, the most common South African dinosaur Massospondylus has specimens ranging from embryo to adult," she said. "Based on this, we were able to rule out age as a possible explanation for the differences we observed in the specimen."
Analysis of the near-complete fossil suggests the newly named species was stocky and walked on two legs. A long, slender neck attached its boxy head to its chunky body. The sauropodomorph stretched nearly ten feet in length. Researchers suspect the species ate both plants and small animals.
The discovery suggests the evolving ecosystems of the late Triassic and early Jurassic periods were more diverse than previously thought.
"This new species is interesting, because we thought previously that there was really only one type of sauropodomorph living in South Africa at this time," Barrett said. "We now know there were actually six or seven of these dinosaurs in this area, as well as variety of other dinosaurs from less common groups. It means that their ecology was much more complex than we used to think. Some of these other sauropodomorphs were like Massospondylus, but a few were close to the origins of true sauropods, if not true sauropods themselves."
