Unlike the later long-necked dinosaurs and even today's elephants, the "giant thunderclap" dinosaur didn't walk on straight limbs. Rather, the 13-ton (12 metric tons) dinosaur moved with "a more crouched posture," study senior researcher Jonah Choiniere, a reader in dinosaur paleontology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, told Live Science Researchers initially unearthed fossils of the 200-million-year-old dinosaur in the late 1980s near South Africa's international border with Lesotho. But it took them until 2017 to excavate all the beast's remains, including a wristbone that helped the team determine how the dinosaur walked They drew from Southern Sotho, a Bantu language spoken in the region, to dub the dinosaur Ledumahadi mafube, which (as mentioned) is a nod to the beast's giant size. The genus name (Ledumahadi) means "a giant thunderclap" in recognition that size, whereas the species name (mafube) means "dawn," as a reference to the animal's existence during the Early Jurassic.
"Nothing larger than Ledumahadi had ever walked the Earth when it evolved in the earliest Jurassic," Choiniere said.
At 49 feet (15 meters) long, L. mafube would have been quite a sight. The enormous plant-eater stood about 13 feet (4 m) tall at its back hips and a little lower in front. It had a skinny neck, a tiny head and a long tail.
Despite its long neck and tail, the "giant thunderclap" wasn't a sauropod dinosaur like the famous Brontosaurus, but a sauropodomorph, one of the closest relatives of the sauropods. Surprisingly, "Ledumahadi was bigger than some true sauropods, and its early [Jurassic] age means that gigantic body size appeared early," Choiniere said.
In other words, L. mafube evolved its giant size independently of the sauropods, Choiniere said.
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