New Dinosaur Species Aardonyx Discovered - 20091114

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Scientists in South Africa have hailed the discovery of a huge new dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae, that predates the giants of the Jurassic period.

Aardonyx celestae, discovered on a farm near Bethlehem in the Free State, is estimated to be 195 million years old, and gives clues as to how the enormous sauropods, the biggest animals ever to walk on earth - some of them as long as 100 feet - evolved.

The creature was more than 20 feet long, six feet tall at the hip, weighed half a ton, and has been named after the wife of the palaeontologist who led the research.

Celeste Yates spent more than two years, and much of two pregnancies, chipping away at the rock that surrounded the fossil.

The genus name comes from the Afrikaans for earth, aard, and the Greek for claw, onyx, as dirt-encrusted claws were among the first of it bones to be uncovered.

Most of the time Aardonyx, a vegetarian, walked upright, but the shape of its foreleg bones shows that they were able to take weight, so that sometimes it would drop to all fours.

"Aardonyx gives us a glimpse into what the first steps towards becoming a sauropod involved," said Adam Yates, the primary investigator from the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

"We did not expect to find anything of this magnitude" in the fossil beds, he added.

It was old even compared to sauropods such as the diplodocus, he said. "It is in effect a living fossil. It's a primitive holdover from an earlier period." Analysis suggests the animal was less than 10 years old when it died, possibly because of a drought, so that a fully grown specimen would be even bigger.

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