Dino card No. 0946 of 2,027

Karongasaurus

Say it: ka-RON-gah-SORE-us

Name means: “Karonga lizard”1

Ate: PlantsLong-necksEarly Cretaceous

Karongasaurus was a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur that lived in Africa during the Early Cretaceous. It is known from just a jawbone and some teeth, but scientists think it was a titanosaur, a type of giant sauropod. Imagine a dinosaur with a U-shaped mouth full of slender, cone-shaped teeth!1

Lived

121 to 113 million years ago4

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Malawi, Africa, in the Dinosaur Beds formation4 1

Food

Plants4 1

Length

9.4 m3

estimate, largest known specimen

Weight

2 tonnes3

estimate, largest known specimen

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

How heavy was it?

as heavy as 1.5 cars

as long as 2 cars parked in a rowas long as 52 bananas end to endas heavy as 67 big dogsas heavy as 400 watermelons

How big was Karongasaurus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Karongasaurus was the first dinosaur ever named in a scientific paper that was published only online, not in a printed book or journal.1

Its fossils include only part of a lower jaw and twenty isolated teeth, found between 1987 and 1992.1

The jaw of Karongasaurus is U-shaped when viewed from above, and its teeth are more cylindrical than those of its relative Malawisaurus.1

Scientists think Karongasaurus had a long, low skull, similar to other titanosaurs with slender front teeth.2

Karongasaurus and Malawisaurus were two different titanosaurs that lived together in Early Cretaceous Malawi, but they had different jaw shapes and probably ate different plants.2

The name Karongasaurus means 'Karonga lizard', after the Karonga district in Malawi where its fossils were dug up.1

AI-made picture of Karongasaurus — An AI-made picture of how Karongasaurus might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Karongasaurus
Named by: Gomani 20054
Group: Long-necks
Family / clade: Titanosauria4
Classification: Sauropodomorpha > Sauropoda > Titanosauria > Macronaria4
Age of the rocks: 121 to 113 million years (Aptian)4
Rock formations: Dinosaur Beds4
Countries: Malawi4
Fossil records: 2 in the Paleobiology Database4
Discovery: Karongasaurus was named by paleontologist Elizabeth Gomani in 2005. The fossils were collected from the Dinosaur Beds of Malawi between 1987 and 1992.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure if a certain tail vertebra from Malawi belongs to Karongasaurus or to another unknown titanosaur.2

Where the facts come from

Karongasaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
palaeo-electronica.org (palaeo-electronica.org)
Karongasaurus gittelmani | Dinosaur Database by DinoAnimals.com (dinoanimals.com)
Karongasaurus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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