A Strange Tusked Mammal Relative May Redraw the Timeline of the First Dinosaurs

For more than 60 years, the broken skull and skeleton of a large animal from Tanzania’s Manda Beds sat in the collections of London’s Natural History Museum. In 1994, a graduate student studying the bones concluded they probably represented a species unknown to science.

But the fossil’s real importance would take decades to emerge.

Researchers have now finally identified the animal as a new species of Dinodontosaurus , a large herbivore with tusks that lived about 240 million years ago. Despite the name, it was not a dinosaur. Dinodontosaurus was a synapsid , part of the evolutionary branch that ultimately gave rise to mammals.

The surprise lies in both where and when it turned up. Until now, Dinodontosaurus was known only from South America. Its appearance in Tanzania creates a new link between African and South American fossil beds dating to the Middle and Late Triassic .