A journey that began with a little boy finding what he thought was a rock on his family’s outback property has ended in a major scientific breakthrough. The “Southern тιтan” is as long as a basketball court and as high as a two-storey building, and has been officially recognised as Australia’s largest known dinosaur. The mammoth creature’s discovery in outback Queensland marks the first time an Australian dinosaur can be ranked among the world’s true giants, a rare space previously occupied exclusively by the giant тιтanosaurs of South America.
“The discovery of Australia’s largest dinosaur was totally unexpected and, as it has turned out, was just the tip of the iceberg of numerous significant dinosaur discoveries that has come since and continue to be made,” Eromanga Natural History Museum and field palaeontologist Robyn Mackenzie said. “These dinosaur discoveries have opened a whole new world, not just to our family, but to people throughout Australia. It has been the most enriching journey.” The remains of the giant тιтanosaurian sauropod, known as “Cooper” for short, were found in 2007 east of Cooper Creek in south-west Queensland, near what’s now known as the Eromanga Natural History Museum.
On Monday, the museum and the Queensland Museum formally named Australoтιтan cooperensis, formalising years of research and giving it official recognition as Australia’s largest dinosaur and one of the largest in the world.
The museum said the journey to the breakthrough began when Ms Mackenzie’s son, Sandy, discovered a memorable “rock” in 2004, confirming her and husband Stuart’s lifelong belief their property was home to dinosaur bones.
The Outback Gondwana Foundation Limited and later the Eromanga Natural History Museum grew from there.
“This new тιтanosaurian is the largest dinosaur from Australia represented by osteological remains,” Ms Mackenzie said.
“It is the first Australian dinosaur to be able to join the elite group of dinosaur giants that until now have mostly been found in South America.
“These are the largest dinosaurs that ever walked on earth and based on the preserved limb size comparisons, this new тιтanosaur is estimated to be in the top five largest in the world.”
Paleontologist Paul Barrett, from London’s Natural History Museum, told 9News the find ranked alongside some of the world’s biggest dinosaurs in terms of overall size and weight.
“This is actually a really nice find in the sense that it’s just building on this kind of wave of new discoveries that are coming out of Australia at the moment,” he said.
For years, Australia was kind of a little kind of footnote in dinosaur evolutionary history, because we knew so little about the dinosaurs from Australia.
“But now thanks to this kind of work, we’re getting a much better picture of how the dinosaurs from Australia fit together with the dinosaurs from elsewhere,” Professor Barrett said
He said it was likely to put paid to speculation there might be something special about Argentina’s Patagonia region that allowed such enormous creatures to evolve there.
“Cooper” is unlikely to be the last piece of history uncovered at the property, roughly 1000 kilometres west of Brisbane. Many other finds have been unearthed over the years, including dozens of bones uncovered just last month, kicking off a lengthy research period.
Professor Barrett said fossil gatherers had “barely scratched the surface” of the enormous layer of rock in which “Cooper” was found.
According to the museum, the long-necked herbivore weighing roughly 67 tonnes was closely related to three other Australian sauropods — Diamantinasaurus, Wintonoтιтan and Savannasaurus — and lived during the Cretaceous Period, about 92–96 million years ago.
That’s long after Australia split from the rest of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland but Professor Barrett believes the Australian dinosaur’s ancestors likely made the journey while the continents were still attached.
Queensland Museum palaeontologist Dr Scott Hocknull said the process of comparing the Australoтιтan bones to other global finds to ensure they were unique was a “long and painstaking task”, made significantly easier by new 3D scanning technology.
“Discoveries like this are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, in a statement.
“Our ultimate goal is to find the evidence that tells the changing story of Queensland, hundreds of millions of years in the making. A grand story all scientists, museums and tourists can get behind.”
Queensland Museum Network chief executive officer Dr Jim Thompson said the study, published on Monday in journal PeerJ, the first dinosaur discovery in the state’s far south-west corner, capping 20 years of a sort of “dinosaur rush” in Australia.
“Australia is one of the last frontiers for dinosaur discovery and Queensland is quickly cementing itself as the palaeo-capital of the nation – there is still plenty more to discover,” he said.
