This, according to Choiniere who revealed in a statement he issued yesterday that the plant-eating dinosaur weighed 12 tonnes and stood about 4 metres high at the hips. This is roughly double the size of a large African elephant. 

He also said that Ledumahadi Mafube was the largest land animal on earth when it lived, which was nearly 200 million years ago. The dinosaur has been named Ledumahadi Mafube, which is Sesotho for “a giant thunderclap at dawn”. 

Ledumahadi Mafube is one of the closest relatives of sauropod dinosaurs. Sauropods, weighing up to 60 tonnes, include well-known species like Brontosaurus.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Botha-Brink from the South African National Musuem in Bloemfontein said that the animal’s bone structure indicates that it had reached adulthood. She says they can tell by looking at the fossilised bone microstructure that the animal grew rapidly to adulthood.

The team of scientists assert that Ledumahadi is closely related to other gigantic dinosaurs from Argentina that lived at a similar time, which reinforces that the super-continent of Pangaea was still assembled in the Early Jurassic. The Wits team says this shows how easily dinosaurs could have walked from Johannesburg to Buenos Aires at that time.

South Africa’s Minister of Science and Technology, Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane, says the discovery of this dinosaur underscores just how important South African palaeontology is to the world. “Not only does our country hold the Cradle of Humankind, but we also have fossils that help us understand the rise of the gigantic dinosaurs. 

This is another example of South Africa taking the high road and making scientific breakthroughs of international significance on the basis of its geographic advantage, as it does in astronomy, marine and polar research, indigenous knowledge, and biodiversity,” Kubayi-Ngubane said in a statement issued on her department’s website.