New dinosaurs are popping up in Africa. Scientists think it could be just the ‘tip of the iceberg’

Floating on a small pontoon boat in Lake Kariba, an international team of scientists found themselves performing a nerve-jangling balancing act; tracking down Zimbabwe’s prehistoric animals while actively avoiding becoming the latest meal for more modern species.

Yet the thousands of Nile crocodiles and hippos submerged within one of the world’s largest artificial lakes, not to mention the elephants and lions patrolling its shore, could not stop the researchers from finding their quarry: the scattered bones of a new dinosaur.

Eight years of painstaking excavation and fossil analysis later, Musango matusadonaensis was named in a study published in July, opening a new window into a key period of prehistory and spotlighting Africa’s untapped paleontological potential.

Roaming the rivers and streams of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana some 210 million years ago in the late Triassic period, Musango is a bipedal early relative of long-necked dinosaurs like Diplodocus, known as a sauropodomorph.

The specimen discovered on Lake Kariba in 2018 was estimated to have been around 4.5 meters long (15 feet), roughly the length of a hatchback car, and weighed 222 kilograms (489 pounds), around the same as an adult pig, when it died almost fully grown at around eight years old.

It is thought to have been a herbivore or omnivore that fed on waterside plants, though knowing for certain will not be possible until a skull is unearthed. While bones from the spine, ribs, arms, legs and feet were excavated, the site did not reveal a head, which can be key in gleaning insights about a species’ diet (teeth and jaws) and senses (eye and ear sockets).

With any number of explanations for the head’s absence, from removal by a predator or scavenger to breaking down before fossilization, it is something that paleontologists are well accustomed to facing, explains expedition leader and study co-author Jonah Choiniere.

“Maybe one out of 100 specimens we find has the skeleton articulated, (in that) it died in that place in the mud and we have all the bones. Of those, maybe one in 10 has a skull,” Choiniere, professor of comparative biology at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told CNN.

“So a lot of what we do is inference, building on the hundreds of years, in some cases, of people collecting fossils and building up enough fossils that we can say, ‘Hey, we feel really comfortable making this inference about the anatomy.’”

Risk and reward

Translating to “living in the bush” in the local Shona language, the name Musango is both a fitting nod to the remote region in which the dinosaur was uncovered and pays homage to the wildlife guide who protected the scientists from local wildlife on the two-week trip.

As owner of Musango Safari Camp in the nearby Matusadona National Park, from which the discovery took its matusadonaensis species name, Steve Edwards was also a key instigator of the expedition, having initially flagged the potential existence of fossils in the area to the researchers.

Probing the farthest edges of the park, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) away from the nearest town, the British, South African and Zimbabwean crew used a local riverboat as a roving laboratory, switching to smaller crafts to make the often-nerve-jangling journey to and from the shoreline.

“I’ve never seen so many hippos in my life,” Choiniere recalled. “Kind of terrifying, but also an amazing wildlife experience and something we don’t normally have as paleontologists.”

Yet risk has reaped scientific reward. Musango marked the team’s second major discovery gleaned from the region after unearthing close relative Musankwa sanyatiensis — a fellow sauropodomorph named in 2024 — across two trips in 2017 and 2018. The pair would have co-existed alongside lungfish and crocodile-like phytosaurs, whose fossils were also found nearby.

Such finds could be pivotal for experts looking to unravel further secrets from the period between the Triassic and Jurassic that saw early dinosaurs become dominant forces in the ecosystem. It is a particularly challenging era for paleontologists to study: few places on Earth preserve rocks so old, and few of those rocks contain fossils.

Yet areas in southern Africa like Lake Kariba are full of sedimentary rock basins that, in accumulating mud and sand, better preserve ancient bones. As a result, new finds are already rewriting our understanding of a pivotal period, much to the excitement of the Musango study’s lead author and British Natural History Museum head of fossil vertebrates Paul Barrett.

“We’ve always assumed that dinosaurs from this part of the world would essentially be the same as those we get across southern Africa,” Barrett told CNN.

“It turns out that, actually, the more we look, the more they’re different … there’s huge potential there that is yet to be fully realized.”

Which begs the question, why has it taken so long for Zimbabwe’s prehistoric possibilities to be appreciated? Musango marked only the fifth dinosaur ever to be named from the country.

Neither Barrett or Choiniere are certain but both offer theories as to why Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa have been historically understudied compared to sites in Europe and North America.

The remoteness of many prime study sites across the continent is one consideration, presenting both logistical challenges in access and reducing the likelihood of locals or private landowners stumbling across potential finds.

Factors outside the scientific domain may also have played a significant role. In Zimbabwe, the civil conflict for independence that began in 1964 and lasted until 1979 had a decades-long impact on paleontology in the country, Barrett theorized, with the movement of many scientists to South Africa leading to a loss of professional expertise that has been slow to return.

“Southern Africa, just in general, has been disproportionately important for understanding the origins of major groups (of dinosaurs), and that extends across a huge time swath,” said Choiniere.

“There’s still a lot of stuff out there waiting to be discovered, which makes it a super exciting place for me and I think for all of our collaborators to work. But I always wish, of course, that we had more people doing it.”

With plans already in place to lead the team back to Lake Kariba in early 2027, Barrett and Choiniere are optimistic their bid to “fill in the paleontological map” of southern Africa can help kickstart a flurry of fossil research within Zimbabwe.

The previous expedition teams featured scientists, researchers and graduate students from the country, including from the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, where Musango and other species found on home soil will ultimately be kept for long-term display and research.

“I don’t want to call it like the dinosaur renaissance of Zimbabwe, but there’s a really a huge, renewed interest in doing work there,” Choiniere said.

“I think it is 100% the tip of the iceberg.”