Blikanasaurus cromptoni
Known simply as "the Blikana dinosaur" from its discovery in 1965 until its official description two decades later, Blikanasaurus was long represented by just a partial hindlimb and was something of an enigma. Its remains were bolstered in 2008 by a second specimen found by J.W. Kitching amongst a job lot of surface tat found at the farm Damplaats in the Eastern Free State's Ladybrand District in 1984. But a single short and robust foot bone didn't really change much, apart from expanding its range some 250 km north.
The leg of Blikanasaurus is extremely stocky with strong ankle bones and unusually-positioned toes, and was long thought to be the property of a giant non-sauropod sauropodomorph (aka "prosauropod"), most of which walked on two legs. However, such a robust limb almost certainly belongs to a heavily-built animal that moved slowly on all-fours, not unlike the giant, highly successful, four legged sauropods that thrived until the Latest Cretaceous extinction. Unfortunately, Blikanasaurus was on the wrong trajectory and was slowly moving towards an evolutionary dead end. Or so we were led to believe.
Although many scientists have brushed Blikanasaurus off as nothing more than an early experiment in sauropodomorph four-legged-ness that was doomed to failure, the latest round of research suggests it may be one of the oldest true sauropods afterall.
The holotype (SAM K403) is the lower part of an "extremely stocky" left leg. A second specimen (BP/1/5271a), plucked from a jumble of "surface float" that J.W. Kitching collected from a "donga" (gully) in the Ladybrand district of the Eastern Free State, South Africa, in 1984, ammounts to a single metatarsal (foot bone). This same gully yielded the only known articulated skeleton and skull of Melanorosaurus readi and the holotype of Eocursor parvus.
