Abstract
The Manda Beds of southwest Tanzania have yielded key insights into the early evolutionary radiation of archosaurian reptiles. Many key archosaur specimens were collected from the Manda Beds in the 1930s and 1960s, but until recently, few of these had been formally published. Here, we describe an archosaur specimen collected in 1963 which has previously been referred to informally as Pallisteria angustimentum. We recognize this specimen as the type of a new taxon, Mambawakale ruhuhu gen. et sp. nov. The holotype and only known specimen of M. ruhuhu comprises a partial skull of large size (greater than 75 cm inferred length), lower jaws and fragments of the postcranium, including three anterior cervical vertebrae and a nearly complete left manus. Mambawakale ruhuhu is characterized by several cranial autapomorphies that allow it to be distinguished with confidence from all other Manda Beds archosaurs, with the possible exception of Stagonosuchus nyassicus for which comparisons are highly constrained due to very limited overlapping material. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that M. ruhuhu is an early diverging pseudosuchian, but more precise resolution is hampered by missing data. Mambawakale ruhuhu is one of the largest known pseudosuchians recovered to date from the Middle Triassic.
Highlights
The Manda Beds of southwest Tanzania have yielded key insights into the early evolutionary radiation of archosaurian reptiles
Abundant fossil material documenting the early stages of the archosaur radiation has been collected from the Manda Beds of the Ruhuhu Basin, southwest Tanzania, which have been generally considered to date to the Anisian stage of the Middle Triassic [7–21], an alternative hypothesis places the Manda Beds as young as the Carnian stage of the Late Triassic [22,23]
These colonial era collections of material from the Manda Beds were reposited in museums in South Africa (Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town), the UK (Natural History Museum, London; University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge) and Germany (Institut für Geologie und Paläontologie, Tübingen; Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie, Munich)
Summary
The Manda Beds of southwest Tanzania have yielded key insights into the early evolutionary radiation of archosaurian reptiles. The first collections of archosaur material from the Manda Beds to be reported in the scientific literature were made in the 1930s by Gordon Murray Stockley of the Tanganyika Geological Survey and Francis Rex Parrington of the University of Cambridge, while other tetrapod material was collected in the same decade by the Austrian geologist Ernst Nowack [7–9,24] At this point, Tanzania was a territory within the British Empire known as Tanganyika, and these discoveries of fossil vertebrates in the Ruhuhu Basin were linked to the extraction of natural resources [7]. Tanzania was a territory within the British Empire known as Tanganyika, and these discoveries of fossil vertebrates in the Ruhuhu Basin were linked to the extraction of natural resources [7] These colonial era collections of material from the Manda Beds were reposited in museums in South Africa (Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town), the UK (Natural History Museum, London; University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge) and Germany (Institut für Geologie und Paläontologie, Tübingen; Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie, Munich). Fossils collected on this 1963 expedition were returned to the UK, where they are held in the collections of the Natural History Museum
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