Wrinkle-faced dinosaur sheds light on continental drift

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AP , CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Monday, May 31, 2004,Page 7

The fossil skull of a peculiar, wrinkle-faced dinosaur unearthed four years ago in the Sahara is providing new evidence that Africa split from the other southern continents more recently than previously thought, scientists say.

"It was sort of a missing puzzle piece that serves to banish the notion that Africa was isolated earlier," said Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist who led the dinosaur-hunting expedition to a remote, desert region of Niger in 2000.

"It really completes the story very convincingly," he said.

The skull, found amid a wealth of dinosaur bones from the late cretaceous period, came from a dinosaur Sereno named Rugops primus, or "first wrinkle face." The meat-eater, believed to be about 9m long and 95 million years old, belonged to a group of southern dinosaurs called abelisaurids.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/05/31/2003157688

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1. Sereno has expanded our knowledge so much

He goes places nobody else has ever been and finds dinosaurs no one ever knew about. It's worth Googling his name and following up on some of his adventures.