Angolan Jurassic Park is calling all paleontologists

After three decades of war-torn brutality, it appears that Angola is finally safe enough for paleontologists to explore one of the world’s richest sources of rare dinosaur bones.

Discovery Channel reports that:

Following the 2002 peace deal, the land is quite literally opening up to fossil hunters who are piecing together the country's Jurassic past. The biggest find to date was made in 2005 when Octavio Mateus from the New Lisbon University, also part of the PaleoAngola project, retrieved five bones from the front left leg of a sauropod dinosaur on the coast at Iembe.

Since then, most skulls and skeletons uncovered by the PaleoAngola team have been from turtles, sharks, and aquatic plesiosaurs and mosasaurs -- which are more closely related to snakes than to dinosaurs.

One of the mosasaur species has even been dubbed Angolasaurus.