A species of dinosaur discovered in Zimbabwe has revealed new details about the the creatures that lived in southern Africa.

Named Musango matusadonaensis, the 4.5-metre-long dinosaur is just the fifth ever named from the African country.

Discovered on the shore of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, it lived 210 million years ago during the Late Triassic period.

Experts say the discovery, which is a collaboration between the UK, South Africa and Zimbabwe, sheds new light on the diversity of the dinosaurs in southern Africa.

The late Triassic was when dinosaurs began to spread across the planet before becoming the dominant animals on Earth during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

While sites in Europe and North America have been studied extensively, fossils from Africa have received less attention.

At the time, Africa would have been part of a supercontinent called Gondwana, which also included present-day South America, India, Australia, and Antarctica.

Musango was a sauropodomorph, an early relative of dinosaurs such as Diplodocus that walked on two legs rather than four.

A study of the fossils of the Musango, which include bones from the spine, arms and feet, reveals a dinosaur which was almost fully grown when it died.

The researchers say it was about 8 years old and would have been around 4.5 metres long, roughly the length of a medium-sized car.

The study authors also believe it was an omnivore, meaning it ate both plants and meat.

It probably feasted on crocodile-like phytosaurs, lungfish, and smaller dinosaurs.

Professor Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum, London and the lead author of the study published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology says:

"Until recently, it was assumed that the dinosaurs living across southern Africa were largely the same," he explains.

"However, these discoveries are showing that this part of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana was actually made of a series of smaller ecosystems – each with a different cast of characters."