The Oldest Dinosaurs Has Been Unearthed In Tanzania Again

Teleocrater was found in Tanzania’s 245-million-year-old Manda Beds, making it roughly 12 million years older than the oldest diagnosable dinosaur. It was about 7-10 feet long and weighed 20-65 pounds with razor sharp teeth; so while not a behemoth it was still likely a formidable carnivore.

Teleocrater  does not look exactly as dinosaur-like as paleontologists might have expected. 

Excavating the remains of Teleocrater rhadinus and other animals in southern Tanzania in 2015. Sterling Nesbitt (left) and Christian Sidor (right)

The foundations of this paleontological paradigm-shifting work were not just laid by Nesbitt and the team in 2015 on their trip to Tanzania, but rather all the way back in 1933. British paleontologist F. Rex Parrington went on pioneering expeditions to Tanzania and brought back a wealth of archosaur fossils to the Natural History Museum in London. His doctoral student, the legendary paleontology personality Alan Charig, spent his dissertation describing and working on these partial remains but unfortunately, most of them were never published.

Charig actually described and named Teleocrater in his thesis in 1956, but it never formally entered the scientific record. Nesbitt and others knew these fossils were housed in the Natural History Museum, so they also knew it was possible to find more of this animal back in the Manda Beds, a field site they have been visiting for years now. “We started digging into a new site, then a few hours later we found bone fragments all over the place. At first, much of what we found were dicynodont (early mammal relative) remains but, underneath, there were a number of reptile bones,” Nesbitt explains.

“On day 3 of excavation, I realized that we had Teleocrater when I found a complete femur, a bone that was present from both sides in the original specimen. Almost a year passed before I could open up the jackets, and I was surprised because most of the smaller reptile bones belonged to Teleocrater including missing parts not present in the 1933 specimen. These were the parts that really helped narrow down the relationships.”

Even though he passed away in 1997, Nesbitt has allowed Charig’s work to live on—he’s been including Charig as an author on articles that build on his original descriptions of the Tanzanian material. The team’s magnificent find of additional Teleocrater material has re-illuminated an extremely important fossil, as co-author and current Natural History Museum paleontologist Paul Barrett remarks, “my colleague Alan Charig would have been thrilled to see one of "his" animals finally being named and occupying such an interesting position in the Tree of Life.”