Earliest Sauropod Found--at School

The remains of a 2-ton dinosaur have lurked at a South African university for more than 20 years -- but only now have researchers realized it is the oldest direct ancestor of the largest creatures ever to walk the earth.

Scientists said Thursday that the fossil, dug up in 1981, was the earliest known example of a sauropod, the group of giant plant-eating reptiles that ruled the Jurassic world between 205 million and 145 million years ago.

The fossil is 215 million years old and represents a new species of sauropod that would have been the largest land animal of its time, weighing 1.8 tons and stretching 26 to 33 feet from nose to tail.

“We have got a very, very early sauropod ... the earliest yet found,” said Adam Yates, a paleontologist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand.

Yates first noticed that the forgotten fossil had been wrongly classified when he was a visiting research student. “I was so lucky that no one else had moved on this specimen before,” he said.

Yates noticed that the creature’s backbone had sauropod characteristics, and after intensive study it was reclassified as a new sauropod species in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Antetonitrus ingenipes, as Yates has named his find, is a minnow compared with its grandchildren. Argentinosaurus, probably the largest sauropod, has a strong claim to be the heaviest land animal of all time, weighing 100 tons.

Previously, the earliest known sauropod was the 210-million-year-old Isanosaurus, found in Thailand.