Coffee With Tatedzvinyu
If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to my tangle of words. It’s cloudy with a chance of heavy rain, a brief respite from the relentless hot spell we have been on. Climate change is that you?
I sometimes wonder if the sun is going to burn us all and we will be extinct just like dinosaurs, and a new age will begin… the polar opposite of the ice-age. I was explaining to my nephew that he needed to play his part in reducing the carbon footprint lest that happens and I asked him if he had any questions. He had just one…
“Were the dinosaurs when you were my age?”
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that dinosaurs are known as tatedzinyu in ChiShona.
Tatedzvinyu = tate + dzvinyu
Our ancestors are called tateguru and a lizard is called dzvinyu, so the word basically means an ancient lizard or ancestor of lizards…
I had never heard this word until a few years ago, but granted that we never have had reason to talk about dinosaurs except unless referring to Jurassic Park.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that we have dinosaurs in Zimbabwe. Well… technically, the land now known as Zimbabwe had dinosaurs about 210 million years ago but a dinosaur skeleton was excavated on the shores of Lake Kariba in 2018.
Musango matusadonaensis, named after where it was discovered, musango (in the bush) the nearby Musango Safari Camp and the adjacent Matusadona National Park along the Kariba shores. It was a sauropodomorph, an early relative of the enormous long-necked dinosaurs such as Diplodocus, but this one walked on two legs with a rather modest length of 4.5 metres and weighing around 220 kilograms.
The fossil was discovered by an international team of palaeontologists, including Zimbabwean scientists in 2018. The Natural History Museum notes that the team found it in an unusual way. Instead of combing arid deserts or mountains, they searched the water-rich shores of Lake Kariba. Operating largely from a boat, the Musankwa (which another dinosaur is named after).
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the new dinosaur made headlines as if it were a recent discovery. That is because, although it was found eight years ago, the formal scientific description and naming of the species were only published in July 2026. That officially makes it the fifth dinosaur species named from Zimbabwe.
Dinosaur Species Of Zimbabwe
| Dinosaur | Discovery | Location | Announced / Described |
|---|---|---|---|
| Musango matusadonaensis | Discovered in 2018 | Shores of Lake Kariba | Announced in July 2026 |
| Musankwa sanyatiensis | Fossils found in March 2018 | Near Lake Kariba | Described in 2024 |
| Mbiresaurus raathi | Discovered during expeditions in 2017 and 2019 | Zambezi Valley | Announced in 2022 |
| Vulcanodon karibaensis | Discovered in 1969 | Island 126, Lake Kariba | Announced in 1972 |
| Coelophysis rhodesiensis Megapnosaurus (Syntarsus rhodesiensi) | Discovered in 1963 | Southcote Farm in Nyamandhlovu And others in Chitake River. Zambezi Valley | Named in 1969 |
We could learn a thing or two from science thingies, they do not rush to be first with the news but instead do their meticouls verification before giving their comprehensive results.
You could say I am a scientist too because I am finally posting about this dinosaur almost 2 month later…
If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that this discovery changes the story of southern Africa. For a long time, the assumption was that dinosaurs across the region were more or less the same, but now this shows that prehistoric Zimbabwe wasn’t simply somewhere dinosaurs happened to pass through, they existed in a surprisingly diverse ecosystem of the Gondwanaland supercontinent.
Zimbabwean history goes back to Great Zimbabwe, the Mutapa kingdom, our ancestors. Now the ground is telling us that the story goes back much further, to a time before mountains had their names, before anyone could call the Zambezi valley home. Somewhere beneath us, are memories and a library the world has yet to finish reading.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that we have a new dinosaur, but I don’t think it will be the last, and I am now wondering if the mythical Zambezi river god, the Nyaminyami might be a remnant of dinosaur-adjacent evolution.
Whats been going on in your neck of the woods?
~B
PS And the storm that had been brewing as I drafted this post became a hailstorm the likes of which we have never experienced and the president declared a state of disaster in areas affected by a heavy hailstorm.
Leave a Reply