GALLERY: Wits PhD student describes new dinosaur

Wits University  PhD student Blair McPhee has described a new species of dinosaur in a paper published in Scientific Reports on 19 August. The new dinosaur is named Pulanesaura eocollum, which means ‘rain lizard’.

The fossils were uncovered at Heelbo, a farm in the eastern Free State. In honour of the late Naudé Bremer, who owned Heelbo and was a strong proponent of paleontology, Pulanesaura was named after Bremer’s daughter, Panie, whose childhood Sesotho nickname was Pulane, which means ‘comes with rain’.

Pulanesaura was a sauropod, or long-necked dinosaur. The discovery is significant as early sauropods are rare in the fossil record, with only a handful of good sauropod specimens known from the Early Jurassic, a time period between 180 and 200 million years ago, when Pulanesaura would have lived.

It was relatively small for a sauropod at about 8m in length, weighing about five tonnes. Unlike its bipedal ancestors, who used the forelimb as an additional means of gathering food, Pulanesaura would have had to rely on the flexibility of its long neck alone.

“This dinosaur showcases the unexpected diversity of locomotion and feeding strategies present in South Africa 200 million years ago. This has serious implications for how dinosaurs were carving up their ecosystems,” says McPhee.

“We used to think that only two species of sauropodomorph dinosaur were present in South Africa. Now we know that the picture was much more complicated, with lots of species present. But Pulanesaura is still special because it was doing something that all these newly discovered species weren’t,” added Dr Jonah Choiniere, a senior researcher at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits.

Authors of the paper include McPhee, Choiniere, Dr Matthew Bonnan (Stockton University), Dr Adam Yates (Museum of Central Australia) and Dr Johann Neveling (A geologist from the Council of Geoscience, SA).