40-Year-Old Dinosaur Sample Revealed To Be Completely New Species

The finding of a new dinosaur doesn’t always need thorough excavation work; instead, a detailed examination of the remains already located in the display of a university is sometimes enough. And this came true with the case of the newly discovered Ngwevu intloko, meaning “grey skull” in the South African Xhosa language.
The new species had previously been classified as a slightly strange sample of Massospondylus carinatus among several other objects in the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) collection at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Eventually, after 4 decades since the discovery of the fossils, experts have now deduced that they are not from Massospondylus carinatus at all. The main distinctions between the two are pointed out by close computed tomography and CT scans.

Source: Pinterest

“This is a new dinosaur that has been hiding in plain sight,” says palaeontologist Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum in London. “The specimen has been in the collections in Johannesburg for about 30 years, and lots of other scientists have already looked at it. But they all thought that it was simply an odd example of Massospondylus.”
One of the remarkable oddities of the stored dinosaur remains had been attributed to a deformed skull, but the newest research indicate no signs of breaking or twisting, because this skull is from a different species of dinosaur and not a disfigured one.
Detailed examination of M. carinatus enabled the team to discard the theory that the growth patterns are the reason why the skull and the skeleton were different. Distinctions between males and females were also excluded, as this commonly doesn’t influence skull shape.

Source: Kimberly Chapelle | American Museum of Natural History

Fossil bone slices were used to date the dinosaur.

Researches on the slices of bone allowed scientists to evaluate the dinosaur’s age, judging it to be a fully-grown adult not as large as the common adult of M. carinatus. “Studying how dinosaurs grew is a very important step in better understanding why some dinosaurs look different,” claims paleontologist Kimberley Chapelle from the University of the Witwatersrand.
“This is a difficult task to accomplish with fossils because it is rare to have a complete age series of fossils from a single species. Luckily, the most common South African dinosaur Massospondylus has specimens ranging from embryo to adult,” she continues.
The latest identification may provide us deeper insights into the characteristics of the world, how it appeared at the start of the Jurassic era roughly 200 million years ago, during the time that dinosaurs are dominating Earth.

Source: Wikimedia Uploads

M. carinatus looked like this, and N. intloko was probably similar.

The latest announced N. intloko dinosaurs would have moved on two limbs, having a slender neck with a tiny, boxy head. It was possibly one of the smaller dinosaurs at that time with only 3 m (10 ft.) from nose to tail.
Believed to be an herbivore, the dinosaur possibly devoured small animals standing on its way, all of which makes it very distinguishable from the giant herbivorous sauropods commonly known from the later Jurassic.
There are more things about M. carinatus that are revealed with the study: it has been long believed to be a “disaster taxon”, a species thriving in the wake of a natural disaster; however, this may now not be the case. The start of the Jurassic might have witnessed much more variety than formerly believed as well.
The current issue is whether there are more samples of M. carinatus that have been miscategorized and more samples of N. intloko out there. “Recent work has now shown that there were actually lots of different types of dinosaurs back then,” says Barrett.
“While we used to think that there was maybe one type of dinosaur, we now know there were actually six or seven sauropodomorph dinosaurs in this area, as well as variety of dinosaurs from other, less common groups.”