African Hunter

Reuploaded due to some sorry sap trying to stave off suicide by hacking my old account and pretending to have a life.

When it comes to the Mesozoic fossil record, Africa is one continent (the other being Australia) that has had serious trouble catching up with the rest of the world. While North America, Europe, Asia, and South America all have incomplete but still fairly robust fossil records that chronicle most of the age of the dinosaurs, from the Late Triassic all the way up to the K-Pg extinction, Africa only has a few fossil hotspots giving us insights about the fauna that roamed the continent at miscellaneous points in the Mesozoic.

While Africa does have its share of famous dinosaurs, in the grand scheme of things, there aren’t that many taxa, especially those known from good and diagnostic remains. When it comes to large predators, most are known from the late Aptian-Cenomanian of the Sahara, specifically Morocco and Niger, with fragmentary fossils of Maastrichtian abelisaurids including the sizable Chenanisaurus also stemming from Morocco. When it comes to the Jurassic of Africa, theropod known from good material are a rarity. One exception is the earliest Jurassic coelophysid Megapnosaurus, who is known from numerous specimens from the Hettangian-Sinemurian Elliot Formation in South Africa, the large noasaurid Elaphrosaurus from the Kimmeridgian Tendaguru Formation of Tanzania, known from a reasonably complete skeleton minus the skull, and of course, the titular African hunter, a medium-sized megalosaurid from the late Bathonian to earliest Oxfordian strata of the upper Tiourarén Formation of Niger, Afrovenator abakensis.

Known from a partial skull and postcranial skeleton, this is the only confidently identified megalosaurid from Africa and Gondwana as a whole, with the only other purported evidence of these animals from the south being teeth from Late Jurassic strata at Tendaguru and the Tacuarembó Formation of Uruguay. Around 23 to 26 feet long, Afrovenator was a more gracile animal with longer limbs and arm compared to the northern megalosaurines like Torvosaurus, Megalosaurus and Wiehenvenator (larger forms that adopted the T. rex-esque mega-theropod bauplan), and seems to represent a distinct lineage of smaller-bodied megalosaurids with longer arms and more cursorial limbs, the afrovenatorines, which has included various other Upper Jurassic megalosaurids asides from the similar-looking Eustreptospondylus, who has been put in its own subfamily, though the differences between afrovenatorines and eustreptospondylines is murky, with some studies finding certain taxa to fall into the latter subfamily instead. The skull notably preserves pronounced crests in front of the eyes similar to the condition in Allosaurus and Asfaltovenator (the latter being either a basal carnosaur or an early allosauroid) but which isn't so well-developed in other megalosaurids (at least those that preserves this part of the skull) like Torvosaurus, Dubreuillosaurus, and Eustreptospondylus. Some new material attributed to Afrovenator that has yet to be properly described might give this taxon an overhaul in the recent future.

At Tiourarén, Afrovenator would have coexisted with the putative ceratosaurian Spinostropheus, the early sauropod Jobaria and possible turiasaurians, and a yet-unnamed basal thyreophoran possibly similar to early forms like Scutellosaurus. The similar-aged El Mers Group in Morocco also shows the presence of early stegosaurians like Adratiklit and the bizarre early ankylosaurian Spicomellus.