Paleontologist Ricardo Araújo is part of a team of researchers that discovered in Mozambique two new species of fossilized tree trunks 259 million years old, which were described in a scientific paper now published.

In the scientific article published in the Journal of African Earth Sciences, the Portuguese paleontologist, the Mozambican Nelson Nhamutole and the South African Marion Bamford describe the two new species of fossilized logs, which they dubbed Protaxodioxylon verniersii and Protaxodioxylon metangulense.

The fossil finds were collected as part of the campaign conducted in 2018 near Lake Niassa, in Niassa province, and studied in the laboratory under the guidance of Ricardo Araújo, from the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, at the Instituto Superior Técnico. 

The Portuguese paleontologist explained to the Lusa agency that the fossilized logs are from a genus that was already known in the northern hemisphere and the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, but that was unknown in the Permian, about 259 million years ago, when dinosaurs did not exist. This discovery "allows us to realize that the climate at that time was subtropical and humid, very different from the climate we have today" in this region, said Ricardo Araújo.

Before, the team had already announced, in 2013, the discovery in Mozambique of fossils of a dicinodon, an ancestor of mammals, whose genus was then called Niassodon, from the same geological period of the Permian. And in 2020, he announced the presence in Mozambique of another dicinodon, the Lystrosaurus, 245 million years old, already from the Triassic.