For 60 years, an ancient skeleton sat mostly forgotten in a London museum, waiting for someone to finally figure out who it was. That skeleton, unearthed in Tanzania back in 1963, turns out to belong to a brand-new species of prehistoric animal — one that is quietly rewriting the story of when and where dinosaurs first appeared on Earth.
An international team led by the University of Bristol studied the fossil and a second, fragmentary skull and confirmed they belonged to a group called dicynodonts — herbivorous, mammal-lineage creatures that thrived before dinosaurs took over. The team named the new species Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, honoring the Wamanda people who live in the Tanzanian region where it was found. The discovery was a surprise. Until now, scientists thought this particular animal lived only in South America.
That simple finding sent ripples through the world of paleontology. The Tanzanian rocks that produced the fossil are the same deposits thought to hold some of the oldest possible dinosaur fossils on record. Researchers previously believed these layers were the same age as rocks in South Africa, which date to the Middle Triassic. But because Dinodontosaurus is now known to exist on both sides of the ocean, it offers a fresh link between the rock sequences in Tanzania and South America — proving they formed at roughly the same time. Fresh radiometric dates from South America suggest those early dinosaur-bearing layers may actually be up to 10 million years younger than the South African ones.
What does that mean? The Triassic rocks of Tanzania can no longer be assumed to preserve the oldest possible dinosaur fossils. Scientists now need to rethink when and where dinosaurs first evolved. The new species, described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, tightens the timeline.
Hady George, the Ph.D. student at the University of Bristol who led the study, said the finding is "the first confirmed record of the genus Dinodontosaurus outside South America" and helps confirm that Tanzania's oldest dinosaur candidates are probably no older than South America's.
Nigel Larkin, a paleontologist at the University of Reading, first studied this very skeleton for his master's thesis back in 1994 — and guessed it was new to science. It took him nearly 30 years to start publishing it. "What's 30 years? It's the blink of an eye compared to the age of this prehistoric specimen," he said. Modern micro-CT scanning and easier global collaboration finally made the job possible.
And Dr. Mike Day, curator at the Natural History Museum in London, noted how fitting it is that a fossil cared for over six decades has finally revealed its identity. By showing that Dinodontosaurus once walked in both South America and eastern Africa, it offers a rare glimpse of our planet as it was 240 million years ago — and a reminder that even well-studied collections still hold surprises waiting to be named.