Scientists in Zimbabwe announced on Thursday the discovery of the remains of the oldest dinosaur in Africa, which roamed the earth about 230 million years ago, writes AFP.

According to the international team of paleontologists who made the discovery, the dinosaur called Mbiresaurus raathi was only one meter tall, had a long tail and weighed up to 30 kg.

“It walked on two legs and had a pretty small head,” Christopher Griffin, the researcher who unearthed the first bone, told AFP on Thursday.

It was probably an omnivore, feeding on plants, small animals and insects. The dinosaur belongs to a species of sauropodomorph, the same genus that would later include giant long-necked dinosaurs, said Griffin, a 31-year-old researcher at Yale University.

The skeleton was found during two expeditions in 2017 and 2019 by a team of researchers from Zimbabwe, Zambia and the United States.

His team’s findings were first published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The remains of dinosaurs of the same era were previously discovered only in South America and India.

Paleontologists chose Zimbabwe to excavate after calculating that when all the continents were joined into a single land mass known as Pangea, it was at roughly the same latitude as previous discoveries in modern-day South America.

“Mbiresaurus raathi is remarkably similar to some dinosaurs of the same age discovered in Brazil and Argentina, supporting the fact that South America and Africa were part of a continuous continental mass,” said Max Langer of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

The dinosaur is named after the Mbire district in northeastern Zimbabwe, where the skeleton was found, and paleontologist Michael Raat, who first reported fossils from the area.