A 60-Year-Old Fossil in a London Museum Just Reset the Clock on Tanzania’s “Oldest Dinosaurs”
For sixty years, a box in a London museum held the answer to a question nobody was asking yet. Now that it's finally been opened, scientists say it may reset how old some of the world's earliest dinosaur fossils really are. The bones belong to a newly named animal, scientists are calling it the Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda fossil, dug up in Tanzania and only now identified by a team at the University of Bristol. It wasn't a dinosaur. It was something stranger and, in its own way, more useful, a tusked, beaked plant-eater called a dicynodont, part of the mammal family tree, living around 240 million years ago in rocks that also happen to hold Tanzania's most famous fossil mystery: possible evidence of the earliest dinosaurs anywhere on Earth.
Here's where the story gets interesting. A Br...