also hid possible predators The bony plates along M. shahinae's back offered some protection but the massive animal was not invulnerable It wasn't fully grown yet but it already weighed as much as a modern male African elephant It was between 26 and 33 feet 8 and 10 m long In the distance it could hear the heavy footsteps of other M. shahinae as the dinosaurs foraged for food SIGNIFICANT FIND In 2013 Dr.Hesham Sallam head of the Department of Geology at Mansoura University in Mansoura Egypt took his crew into the desert 470 miles 750 km southwest of Cairo For five years they had been searching for fossils He told his team to spread out to cover as much ground as possible As they walked his cell phone rang He was one mile 2 km from the searcher who was calling Doctor there are a lot of bones Come and see them she said As soon as he spotted the first bone he suspected they had made a historic discovery His team had found a partial dinosaur skeleton By the time they were done excavating they had located part of the skull the lower jaw vertebrae from the neck and back ribs
Sauropods long necks helped them reach food most of the shoulder and upper front leg part of a hind foot and pieces of armor plating The skeleton more complete than many fossils was a sauropod a long necked herbivorous or plant eating dinosaur They eventually named this new reptile Mansourasaurus shahinae It lived approximately 80 million years ago MYA during the end of the Cretaceous
MASS EXTINCTION At the end of the Cretaceous all of the nonavian dinosaurs went extinct The avian dinosaurs continued to evolve into birds The dinosaurs weren't the only reptiles to be hit hard by this extinction event So were two groups of ocean predators mosasaurs and plesiosaurs Scientists don't agree on what caused this global extinction but they do know that it was something that changed the environment causing greenhouse gases to rise and temperatures around the world to heat up Some scientists believe this was caused by an asteroid striking Earth and throwing dust and dirt into the air Others believe debris was thrown into the air when volcanoes erupted Whatever the cause plants that needed a lot of sunlight died out Animals that ate these plants also died as did animals that preyed on them This mass extinction meant that other plants and animals had the opportunity to fill those niches leading to the evolution of many new species This period is sometimes known as the End Cretaceous Extinction or the Cretaceous Paleogene Extinction because the extinctions came between the Cretaceous and Paleogene 66-23 MYA periods period 145-66 MYA just before the majority of dinosaurs became extinct It was approximately the length of a school bus and weighed about as much as an African elephant Scientists know that it wasn't fully grown because its leg bones had not fully fused a process in which bones in a young animal grow together as the animal ages Its discovery was vitally important because very few fossils from the Cretaceous have been found in Africa It is difficult to find fossils in Africa because so much of the land is covered in vegetation Sallam and his crew made their find in the desert where the soil and rocks are visible Because so few African fossils have been found all discoveries like Sallam's are important This one is key because it also refutes a theory about the isolation of African dinosaurs
Three hundred MYA Earth's landmasses formed a single supercontinent Pangaea During the Cretaceous this supercontinent divided into Gondwana which included Africa and Laurasia which included Europe Because of this split many scientists believed that by the late Cretaceous dinosaurs in Africa were isolated from those in Europe Yet M. shahinae more closely resembled its European relatives than it resembled the sauropods of southern Africa Africa was not as isolated as scientists had thought For Dr. Sallam and his team M. shahinae is only the beginning to understanding African dinosaurs The paleontologists hope to make another find Where they found the huge herbivore they also hope to find the carnivore GONDWANA Three hundred MYA the continents as seen on Earth today did not exist Instead there was one large landmass known by scientists as Pangaea pictured Scientists believe that this supercontinent sat on several tectonic plates or slabs of rock that make up the surface of the planet As these tectonic plates shifted Pangaea split and by 200 MYA there were two continents Gondwana contained what are now South America Africa Australia and Antarctica Laurasia included modern North America Europe and Asia The tectonic plates continued to shift and landmasses moved The continents have been in their modern positions for less than 65 million years
