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Angola is best known for oil and diamonds, but dinosaur hunters say the country holds a "museum in the ground" of rare fossils -- some actually jutting from the earth -- waiting to be discovered.
"Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology," explained Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils.
"Due to the war, there's been little research carried out so far, but now we're getting in finally and there's so much to find. "In some areas there are literally fossils sticking out of the rocks. It's like a museum in the ground."
The first reports of dinosaur remains in Angola were made in the 1960s, but a bloody liberation struggle against the Portuguese followed by three decades of civil war covered the country in landmines and made it a no-go zone for researchers.
Following the 2002 peace deal, however, 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.
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