Visitors to Lake Kariba – the world’s largest man-made lake, along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe – come to enjoy the abundant wildlife, fine fishing or spectacular scenery. However, in 2017, our crew of palaeontologists came to Zimbabwe to hunt game of a different kind: dinosaurs.
Many of our discoveries are still under study, but the team has just announced its first new dinosaur, dubbed Musankwa sanyatiensis.
At first sight, it’s unremarkable – just a few bones from a single hind leg. It was found with the thigh, shin and ankle bones still connected, but weathering out on the shore of Spurwing Island. However, once it was cleaned and back in the laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, close comparisons with other Late Triassic (235-199 million years ago) dinosaurs from Africa and elsewhere revealed that it had several unique features that marked it out as a previously unknown species. Those features included the shapes and sizes of the areas where the muscles would have attached to the bones.
