The biggest creature ever found in Australia could only be the tip of the iceberg, with bigger bones being tested
One of the five biggest dinosaurs in history has been discovered in Australia, a plant-eating sauropod that lived between 92 and 96 million years ago.
It’s being called “Australotitan Cooperensis”—which doesn’t really role off the tongue, but these names never do—which is a mix of ‘southern titan’ and the name of the creek close to which the bone was first discovered.
As you can guess, they’re calling it “Cooper”.
The discovery of the first bone was actually quite a while ago—15 years to be exact, as it was found in 2006 by cattle farmers in Eromanga in Queensland, Australia.
Research was published this week that found that the sauropod, a plant-eater, lived in the Cretaceous period back when Australia was still attached to Antartica. The creature was 5 to 6.5 meters in height and 25-30 meters in length.
That’s the length of a basketball court, and as tall as a two-storey building, to put it in perspective.
It’s the largest species ever discovered in Australia, and is among the ‘titanosaurs’ that were found in South America.
That makes the new species the largest dinosaur ever found in Australia and puts it in the top five in the world, joining an elite group of titanosaurs previously only discovered in South America.
“Discoveries like this are just the tip of the iceberg,” according to Queensland Museum curator and palaeontologist Scott Hocknull, lead author of the paper.
To be sure that the bones are a new species, the palaeontologists at the Eromanga Nautral History Museum and Queensland Museum, who you can probably imagine to be just a bunch of Ross Gellers, 3D scan each bone to find comparisons and make sure that the species are distinct.
“To make sure Australotitan was a different species, we needed to compare its bones to the bones of other species from Queensland and globally,” Hocknull says. “This was a very long and painstaking task.”
This wasn’t the only skeleton discovered in the area, it turns out. Tons have een found in what is believed to have been a pathway for sauropods, but the rest are still being studied.
There could be even larger dinosaurs waiting to be discovered, as sauropods were usually prey for theropods, which could get even bigger.
“We’ve found a couple of small theropod dinosaurs in Australia … but it wouldn’t have bothered Australotitan, which suggests there is a very large predatory dinosaur out there somewhere. We just haven’t found it yet.”