A dinosaur named Musango steps out of Zimbabwe's red rocks, 210 million years on

On the shore of Lake Kariba, inside Zimbabwe's Matusadona National Park, a safari camp manager named Steve Edwards kept finding bones in the brick-red mudstone. Those finds have now been described as a new dinosaur: Musango matusadonaensis, a plant-eating sauropodomorph — an early relative of the long-necked giants — that walked on two legs, stretched about 4.5 metres long, and lived some 210 million years ago. What excites the international team, led from the University of the Witwatersrand, is that Zimbabwe's dinosaurs are not copies of South Africa's better-known species: they are distinct animals, hinting that ancient climate shaped separate casts of characters. Lungfish and aquatic reptiles found alongside deepen the picture of a lost world found nowhere else.