Paleontologists from Mansoura University have unearthed a fossil of a new species of dinosaur in the Dakhla oasis in central Egypt that lived nearly 80 million years ago. Scientists call the finding an “incredible discovery,” describing it as critical for science. The remains of the animal indicate that the dinosaur was a plant-eating Cretaceous Period creature, which paleontologists call Mansourasaurus Shahinae. Findings show that the dinosaur was about 10 meters long and weighed 5,000 kg and was a member of a group called titanosaurs that included the earth’s largest-ever land animals. “Its remains […] are the most complete of any mainland African land vertebrate during an even larger time span, the roughly 30 million years before the dinosaur mass extinction 66 million years ago,” said paleontologist Hesham Sallam of Egypt’s Mansoura University, who led the study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, reports Reuters. “It was thrilling for my students to uncover bone after bone, as each new element we recovered helped to reveal who this giant dinosaur was,” Sallam went on. The African continent is unexplored in terms of dinasour fossils and the new finding in Egypt helps shed…
