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Mikhail Polyakov

A new dinosaur, Musango, from Zimbabwe: how Zimbabwe's dinosaurs differ from South African ones and why the authors suspect climate

Level: BeginnerReading time: 5 min

Topics: Science

A reddish-brown fossil bone fragment on dark cloth beside a palaeontologist brush and a plain wooden ruler, with a blurred clay river bank behind

Short answer: palaeontologists described a new dinosaur, Musango matusadonaensis, from Zimbabwe, which lived about 210 million years ago, in the Late Triassic. It is a bipedal dinosaur about 4.5 metres long and weighing about 220 kilograms (these are the authors' estimates from an incomplete skeleton), whose closest relatives mostly ate plants, and it turned out to be unlike the dinosaurs of neighbouring South Africa. The author of the account, palaeontologist Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London, suggests that the cause could be differences in climate, but calls this a suspicion that has yet to be tested. Below is what was found, how it was searched for and what in this conclusion is established.

What was found

There is one source: Paul Barrett's article, published on The Conversation and reprinted by ScienceDaily on 13 October 2026. This is the account of a researcher about his own work; I did not read the scientific paper itself.

  • What the animal is. Musango matusadonaensis belongs to the sauropodomorphs, a subgroup of dinosaurs from which four-legged, long-necked giants such as Diplodocus later descended.
  • What it was like. Judging by the structure of the skeleton, it was a bipedal animal that walked only on its hind legs, about 4.5 metres long and weighing 220 kilograms (these are the authors' estimates from an incomplete skeleton). Growth marks in the bones show that the animal was not yet fully adult (a "subadult" in English) when it died.
  • What is missing. The skeleton is incomplete and the skull was not preserved, so what it ate is unknown. Its closest relatives mostly ate plants.
  • Where it was found. The remains lay in the bank of the Nyamasango River near Musango Island. That is where the species name comes from.
  • Age and rock. The finds were collected in reddish-brown clay-rich and sandy rocks laid down by ancient rivers about 210 million years ago, in the Late Triassic (from 237 to 201 million years ago).
  • What the landscape was. According to geological evidence and plant fossils, the landscape in the Lake Kariba area in the Triassic was dry, with stands of large conifer trees and green strips of vegetation along permanent watercourses.

How it was searched for

  • Early finds. Dinosaur bones in Zimbabwe have been known since 1916, but, according to the author, at first few scientists took notice of them. They became widely known only in the 1970s thanks to the work of the Zimbabwean palaeontologists Geoffrey Bond and Michael Raath, who found a lot of material near Bulawayo and in the lower Zambezi Valley. Most of those finds were assigned to species described in neighbouring South Africa.
  • New sites. Work in Zimbabwe stalled for several decades, but, according to the author, a group of devoted fossil hunters kept searching. One of them, Steve Edwards, a tourist camp manager, found new, rich sites on the shore of Lake Kariba, an artificial lake on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia. The news reached Jonah Choiniere at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and he assembled an international team.
  • Expeditions. The sites on the lake shore are deep inside Matusadona National Park, so the team used a houseboat as a mobile hotel and laboratory. There were two expeditions, in 2017 and 2018. Since then the material has been cleaned and studied.

What turned out to be unexpected

According to the author, Zimbabwe's dinosaurs are not simply an extension of the well-studied fauna of South Africa; among them are species found only in this region.

  • Two species. Besides Musango, Musankwa was described from the same layers in 2024. According to the author, both species are found only in Zimbabwe.
  • The expectation was not met. The researchers expected to find South African species in these layers because, according to the author, they have a similar age and are close by, but all the material collected turned out to be different from the South African.
  • Not the closest relatives. Zimbabwe's dinosaurs also did not turn out to be the closest relatives of their South African neighbours.
  • Other animals. In the same places other fossils were found, including lungfish and aquatic reptiles called phytosaurs, which are rare or absent at South African sites.
  • Re-examining old collections. The author writes that the team has begun to reassess the historical collections in Bulawayo. It seems that many of those fossils also cannot be assigned to South African species, contrary to the earlier view.

What is established and what is a hypothesis

This is my arrangement, not words from the article.

  1. Established by the author of the study. A new species is described from an incomplete skeleton; in the layers near Lake Kariba the dinosaurs found differ from South African ones.
  2. Suspicion. The cause of the differences may be climate. The author writes: then, as now, Zimbabwe lay north of South Africa and closer to the equator, so climate differences might be responsible for the different cast of animals, and climate is known to have a strong effect on the distribution of living animals. This is still an assumption, not a result of measurements.
  3. What they intend to test. The team wants to return to Lake Kariba for more fossils, to clarify the age and environmental conditions in the dinosaur-bearing layers and to compare them with other places.

How to check this if the scientific paper is not available to you. Look at how each claim is presented in the retelling: whether it says what it is derived from, and whether there are qualifiers such as "we suspect", "it seems", "may be". If you cannot open the paper, look in the retelling for answers to three questions: what exactly was measured or found, who says so (the author of the study or the one retelling it) and what qualifiers are given. Do not pass on a conclusion stronger than it is stated in the retelling. This retelling can be checked against the ScienceDaily article, but without the scientific paper itself the author's conclusions cannot be independently verified, so such a text is good as a reason to find and read the paper, not as a basis for decisions.

Summary

Musango matusadonaensis, a bipedal sauropodomorph about 4.5 metres long, lived in Zimbabwe about 210 million years ago. Together with the species Musankwa, described in 2024, it shows that Zimbabwe's dinosaurs differed from South African ones, although the researchers expected the opposite. The author for now calls the explanation through climate a suspicion and intends to test it with new expeditions.

See also another article in this section: Homo erectus in South Africa 2 million years ago.

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