Credit...Eromanga Natural History Museum
The New York Times has a story about a new dinosaur... from Australia. Australotitan cooperensis is a titanosaur, which is a type of sauropod. It weighted about 70 tons and lived about 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. It's the largest dinosaur known from Australia. The dinosaur was described in a paper in the journal PeerJ.
Robyn and Stuart Mackenzie, riding motorbikes one day in 2006 on their vast sheep and cattle farm in the Australian outback, spotted a pile of what looked like large black rocks.
On close inspection, they appeared to be dinosaur bones. An even closer inspection, with the help of paleontologists who were part of a new study, found that they belonged to a new species of dinosaur that is the largest ever found in Australia and one of the largest in the world.
Researchers in Eromanga, Queensland, where the Mackenzies live, said on Monday that they had identified the new species, calling it Australotitan cooperensis. Nicknamed Cooper after a creek near the fossil site, it was a long-necked, plant-eating titanosaur estimated to have lived more than 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. Like the brachiosaurus, the titanosaur was part of a group called sauropods, which were the largest of all the dinosaurs.
Though closely related to three other titanosaur species discovered in Australia, Australotitan was significantly larger. It is estimated to have weighed about 70 tons, measured two stories tall and extended to about the length of a basketball court, making it comparable in size to the gargantuan titanosaurs that have been found in South America. The researchers’ findings were published on Monday in the journal PeerJ.
Credit...Eromanga Natural History Museum
