New dinosaur species from Zimbabwe found and described by museum expert
Artist reconstruction of Musankwa sanyatiensis, walking in Triassic shallow waters past a metoposaur © Atashni Moopen.
LONDON.—
An international team of scientists, from Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, have unveiled a new dinosaur species discovered from fossils found on the shoreline of Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe. The remarkable find, named Musankwa sanyatiensis, marks only the fourth dinosaur species to have been named from Zimbabwe and is the first to be named from the Mid-Zambezi Basin in over 50 years.
The rocks yielding this new specimen date back to the Late Triassic period, approximately 210 million years ago. Musankwa sanyatiensis is represented by the remains of a single hind leg, including its thigh, shin, and ankle bones.
The fossils of Musanwka were discovered on an expedition to northern Zimbabwe in 2018, when Prof. Paul Barrett, palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum and the study’s lead author, noticed the leg bones sticking out of the ground.
Paul commented: “We were walking along the shoreline when I noticed these leg bones eroding out of the ground. After we excavated the fossils, we realised it was quite different from the dinosaurs you might expect to find in the area.
“I’ve named many species in my career, but this is the first time I’ve described a dinosaur that I found myself.”
The genus name of the new dinosaur honours a boat, named ‘Musankwa’, which was loaned to the research group and served as the team’s home and mobile laboratory. The species name reflects one of the rivers flowing into Lake Kariba, the Sanyati.
Evolutionary analysis reveals that Musankwa sanyatiensis was a member of the Sauropodomorpha, a group of bipedal, long-necked dinosaurs that were widespread during the Late Triassic. Weighing in at around 390kg, roughly the same as a horse, and reaching 1.5 metres at the hip, it would have been one of the larger dinosaurs of its era.
The research team’s evolutionary trees hinted that the new species might be linked to Riojasaurus from Argentina and Eucnemesaurus from South Africa. This may mean these animals were a widespread group of dinosaurs able to move back and forth between what is now South America and southern Africa.
Paul added, “This particular species dates back to the Late Triassic when dinosaurs were getting larger and starting to dominate ecosystems. At this time, they began to become more diverse and spread around the world, making it an important era to investigate.”
Africa has a long history of dinosaur discovery, with the first dinosaur in the southern hemisphere found in South Africa just three years after the term "dinosaur" was coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1842. However, most known dinosaur fossils have been found in ten countries predominantly in the northern hemisphere, leading to a sparse representation of African dinosaur diversity in the global fossil record.
Dr Kimberley ‘Kimi” Chapelle, assistant professor at Stonybrook University and an honorary associate at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, comments: “The main reason for the underrepresentation of African dinosaur fossils is ‘undersampling’. Put simply, there have been fewer people looking for and unearthing dinosaurs in comparison with other regions of the world.
“Based on where it sits on the dinosaur family tree, Musanwka sanyantiensis is the first dinosaur of its kind from Zimbabwe. It therefore highlights the potential of the region for further palaeontological discoveries.”
The study, A new Late Triassic sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Mid-Zambezi Basin, Zimbabwe, is published in the journal, Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
