Aardonyx celestae: new dinosaur in South Africa

Researchers in South Africa have claimed the discovery of an enormous new dinosaur, named Aardonyx celestae, which is believed to predate the giants specimens of the Jurassic period.

Discovered on a farm near Bethlehem in the Free State, Aardonyx celestae is understood to be 195 million years old and offers clues as to how the huge sauropods, the largest animals ever to walk on the planet, evolved.

Aardonyx celestae was more than 20 feet in length, six feet tall at the hip, weighed half a ton, and the wife of the paleontologist who discovered the remains of the animal was the inspiration for the name of the dinosaur.

Celeste Yates joined her husband and spent more than two years chipping away at the rock in a bid to expose the fossil. She even went through this process with two pregnancies.

The genus name used to call the animal is from the Afrikaans word for earth, aard, as well as the Greek word for claw, onyx, as the first of the bones to be uncovered were dirt-encrusted claws.

Scientist believe that Aardonyx, a vegetarian, walked upright most of the time, but the shape of its foreleg bones indicates that they were capable of taking weight, so they sometimes dropped to all fours.

The primary investigator at the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research in Johannesburg Adam Yates said that Aardonyx gives the scientific community a glimpse into the implications of the first steps towards becoming a sauropod. 

He added that the magnitude of the discovery was quite unexpected.

Yates said that Aardonyx was already old compared to sauropods like the diplodocus. Analysis have shown that the animal was younger than 10 years old when it died, so that an adult specimen would be even larger.