A New Dinosaur from Zimbabwe: Musango matusadonaensis

Publication Info:

Transcript:

Paul M. Barrett et al. 2026. A new sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Pebbly Arkose Formation (Upper Triassic: Norian) of Kariba, Zimbabwe. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 24 (2); doi: 10.1080/14772019.2026.2678610

Meet Musango matusadonaensis, the newest sauropodomorph from Zimbabwe! This 15 foot relative of sauropods could be changing what paleontologists know about the dinosaurs that lived in what's now Southern Africa, 200 million years ago.

Episode 318

Notes:

Your favorite dinosaur never saw Pangaea. At least it probably didn't. As a matter of fact, most dinosaurs never saw Pangaea. But there's a brand new species that did, and it's changing a lot of what paleontologists know about dinosaurs from what's now southern Africa. Despite what a lot of us learned, or at least thought we learned, the majority of dinosaurs didn't live on a supercontinent called Pangaea. I'm not even including the modern dinosaurs. I'm talking about specifically the non-avian dinosaurs. And that's because Pangaea broke up into a Gondwana and Laurasia 215 to 175 million years ago at the very end of the Triassic into the early Jurassic. Gondwana later becoming the land masses of the southern hemisphere, Laurasia becoming the northern, roughly speaking. But that kind of transitional period, while Pangaea was breaking up into the two supercontinents, was right when this dinosaur was alive. Meet Musango matusadonaensis, the newly named sauropodomorph unearthed in Zimbabwe in 2018. Being a sauropodomorph, that means that Musangwe is related to the largest animals to ever walk on Earth, the sauropods. Even though it's not in the true sauropod group, and looked pretty different at only about 15 ft long, 500 lb, and much more similar to dinosaurs like Massospondylus than Brachiosaurus. It also lived alongside its close relative Musankwa, originally discovered in 2024, but was a very different animal, with Musankwa being more than twice its size and filling very different ecological niches. That really matters because up until this point a lot of paleontologists believed that the dinosaurs living in southern Africa at the time were all fairly similar. But it's looking more and more like the species in the area were far more diverse, as long with the ecosystems they lived in. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.