Meet Musango: A New Dinosaur From the Shores of Lake Kariba

Professor Pip crouched down on the warm red dirt by the lake, pulled a soft brush and a little magnifying glass from his lab coat, and began, ever so gently, to sweep, sweep, sweep at a knobby lump poking out of the ground.

"Oh my whiskers," he whispered. "Look at that."

The lump had a shape. A curve. A bone.

Mia knelt beside him with her own tiny brush. Leo held a canvas bag ready. "What is it, Professor Pip?"

"This," said Pip, his tail flicking happily, "is a thigh bone. And not just any thigh bone. This one belonged to a dinosaur who took a nap here… two hundred and ten million years ago."

Leo's eyes went as big as saucers. "TWO HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION?"

"Precisely," said Pip. "That was a time called the Late Triassic. Dinosaurs had just started to spread across the whole world. And this fellow — scientists are calling him Musango, which means 'living in the bush' — was a young one. About your age, in dinosaur years."

"How can you tell how old he was?" asked Mia.

"Because bones grow like tree trunks," Pip whispered. He drew a circle in the dirt and added rings inside it. "Every year a dinosaur was alive, its bones added a new ring. If you cut a bone open — very carefully, of course — you can count them. Just like tree rings. This little one had about eight."

"How big was he?" Leo asked.

"About the length of a car. And he was a sauropodomorph — the great-great-great-great-grandparent kind of dinosaur that would one day grow into the enormous long-necked giants, some as long as three school buses lined up."

Mia looked at the little thigh bone. "So he was a baby giant?"

"A young cousin of the giants," Pip said. "For 210 million years, this bone waited here for someone to come and say hello. And today, my fellow scientists, that someone is us."

He handed Mia the little brush. "Sweep gently. Every fossil is a message from a very, very long time ago."