Its fossils were unearthed in southern France. There are other fossilized footprints from Poland that indicate a similar-sized theropod inhabited the northern supercontinent of Laurasia around the same time. Scientists on Thursday described the footprints from an ancient river bank in Lesotho and estimated that the dinosaur, which they named Kayentapus ambrokholohali, was about 30 feet (9 meters) long. That research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.Kayentapus lived early in the Jurassic Period, shortly after a mass extinction that doomed other large reptilian terrestrial predators that lived in the preceding Triassic Period when dinosaurs first appeared. Theropods of similar size do not appear in the fossil record until 30 million years later, Knoll said.

The scientists concluded it was a large theropod -- the two-legged carnivorous dinosaur group that included later giants like Tyrannosaurus and Giganotosaurus -- but that it was more lightly built than those brutes.“It is the first evidence of an extremely large meat-eating animal roaming a landscape otherwise dominated by a variety of herbivorous, omnivorous and much-smaller carnivorous dinosaurs,” added palaeontologist Lara Sciscio of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.In separate research, other scientists on Thursday described another new dinosaur, a plant-eater called Matheronodon provincial, that lived 70 million years ago. Matheronodon is distinctive for its large teeth with a chisel-like cutting edge that provided a powerful shearing action like scissors to eat tough vegetation, said palaeontologist Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.

The theropod group also gave rise to birds. The footprints were found in what was once a river bank, bearing telltale ripple marks and desiccation cracks. (Photo credit: Reuters) A trail of fossilized three-toed footprints that measure nearly two feet (57 cm) long shows that a huge meat-eating dinosaur stalked southern Africa 200 million years ago at a time when most carnivorous dinosaurs were modest-sized beasts. The scientists concluded it was a large theropod -- the two-legged carnivorous dinosaur group.. The research was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. No fossilized bones were found, but the footprints alone showed a lot about the animal.42nd Day Of Lockdown Total Cases 49,368 2,934 Recovered 13,739 894 Deaths 1,658 92 Maharashtra155252465583 Gujarat62451381368 Delhi5105146864 Tamil Nadu4058148533 Rajasthan3158152589 Madhya Pradesh30591000176 Uttar Pradesh288098756 Andhra Pradesh171758934 Punjab145113325 West Bengal1344264140 Telangana108558529 Jammu and Kashmir7413208 Karnataka67333128 Haryana5482566 China wholesale OIL RING Bihar5351604 Kerala5034624 Odisha176601 Jharkhand119273 Chandigarh115211 Uttarakhand61391 Chhatisgarh58360 Assam.