Cienciaes.com: Massospondylus, the dinosaur with long vertebrae

2012-02-16 13:45:13

In 1853, the explorer JM Orpen found in the vicinity of the South African city of Harrismith, located in the north of Lesotho, the fossilized bones of a large animal: several vertebrae, a shoulder blade, a humerus, a femur, a tibia, part of a pelvis, and bones of the hands and feet. Orpen sent the bones to paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, who a few years earlier had coined the term “dinosaur” for these large fossil lizards. Owen named the new South African dinosaur Massospondylus, from the Greek terms “masson” (“greatest”, “largest”) and “spondylos” (“vertebra”) due to its enormous cervical vertebrae, longer than they are wide. These bones were kept in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, but were destroyed during World War II, and only their plaster casts survive today. But after that first find, more Massospondylus remains have been found in South Africa, Lesotho and Zimbabwe. Today we possess at least eighty partial skeletons and four skulls of the species.

Massospondylus is a prosauropod, a long-necked primitive dinosaur from the early Jurassic that belongs to a side branch of the lineage that led to large sauropods such as brontosaurus and Diplodocus in the late Jurassic period.

In 1977, South African paleontologist James Kitching assigned to Massospondylus seven 190-million-year-old eggs that had turned up during road construction work in South Africa’s Golden Gate Highlands National Park, near the site where the first eggs had been found. remains of the species. Almost thirty years later, the embryos contained in those eggs were studied, the oldest dinosaur embryos found to date.

The latest discovery relating to this dinosaur was published last January. The systematic excavation in the place where the first Massospondylus eggs appeared, a vertical cut 25 meters high, has revealed the oldest known dinosaur nesting area. Fossil eggs have been found on various levels, meaning that the Massospondylus regularly congregated there to breed. And the site has not yet been fully excavated. Many discoveries remain to be made.