Mambawakale

Mambawakale ruhuhu is a species and genus of pseudosuchian archosaur known from the Middle Triassic.

Description[]

Fossils of this particularly larger, crocodile-like beast we're unearthed in Tanzania.. However, it's taken almost six decades for the reptile to formally be recognised as a new species. Now called the Mambawakale ruhuhu, the creature would have roamed the Earth 240 million years ago. It's said to be an ancient relative of the modern crocodiles we know today.

The creature was a major predator when the dinosaurs were only just emerging. London's Natural History Museum stated: "This active land predator would have been a fearsome sight, and probably the largest carnivore in its ecosystem." Scientists have been examining its fossilised skull and curved serrated teeth. Part of its spine and hand were also discovered. The Mambawakale ruhuhu wouldn't have looked like anything we have on Earth today.

Unlike crocodiles, it was Terrestrial. Experts think the creature would have been top of the food chain before dinosaurs took over. The Natural History Museum explained: "They would have stalked the environment looking to predate on anything they could sink their long, steak knife-like teeth into, be it an early dinosaur, an early mammalian ancestor or any other creatures small enough to be prey."

The name of the person who found the fossils remains unknown but it was like a Tanzanian local who was helping the expedition. More details about the monstrous creature have been published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Dr David Gower, a co-author of the paper, said: "This is one of the last major archosaur fossils from the 1963 expedition that had remained unstudied.

"It’s fantastic to be able to finally share this wonderful fossil with the world, nearly 60 years after it was discovered."

The early archosaur Mambawakale ruhuhu, whose name means "ancient crocodile from the Ruhuhu Basin" in Kiswahili. Paleontologists found only its skull, jaw and a few other bones, so the rest of the body — mainly the tail and limbs — are reconstructed based on the anatomy of its close relatives.

The Manda Beds of southwest Tanzania have yielded key insights into the early evolutionary radiation of archosaurian reptiles. Many key archosaur specimens were collected from the Manda Beds in the 1930s and 1960s, but until recently, few of these had been formally published. Here, an archosaur specimen collected in 1963 which has previously been referred to informally as Pallisteria angustimentum. This particular specimen has officially recognized as the type of a new taxon, Mambawakale ruhuhu gen. et sp. nov.

The holotype and only known specimen of M. ruhuhu comprises a partial skull of large size (greater than 75 cm inferred length), lower jaws and fragments of the postcranium, including three anterior cervical vertebrae and a nearly complete left manus. Mambawakale ruhuhu is characterized by several cranial autapomorphies that allow it to be distinguished with confidence from all other Manda Beds archosaurs, with the possible exception of Stagonosuchus nyassicus for which comparisons are highly constrained due to very limited overlapping material. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that M. ruhuhu is an early diverging pseudosuchian, but more precise resolution is hampered by missing data. Mambawakale ruhuhu is one of the largest known pseudosuchians recovered to date from the Middle Triassic.

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Mambawakale

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