Discovered in southwest Queensland (Australia), it is the largest dinosaur species ever found in Australia. The huge titanosaur lived more than 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period (approximately 92-96 million years ago).
The gigantic dinosaur belongs to Titanosauria , a diverse group of sauropod dinosaurs (long-necked herbivores) and would have measured between 25-30 meters long (as long as a basketball court or larger than a tennis court) from snout to the tip of the tail, about 5-6.5 meters high and would have weighed about 23-74 tons.
With its gigantic size, this dinosaur ate plants with its long neck (similar to Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus) and, according to its metrics, it belongs to the dozen of the largest dinosaur species in the world.
” Australotitan cooperensis joins the growing list of exclusively Australian dinosaur species discovered in the Queensland outback, and also shows an entirely new area for dinosaur discovery in Australia,” said Scott Hocknull, researcher at the Museum of Queensland and the University. from Melbourne.
The remains were found near Cooper Creek in the Eromanga Basin. They found the dinosaur’s shoulder blades, limbs, and pelvic bones, many of them largely intact. The remote location, size and fragility of the dinosaur bones contributed to a delay in the official determination that the remains belonged to a previously unknown species, paleontologists clarified.
It was a very long and tedious process, in which 3D comparisons of the bones found with those of their closest cousins were carried out, digitally scanning each bone and comparing the results with the bones of other sauropods, until confirming that they were it was about a new species.
“The 3D scans we created allowed me to transport around thousands of kilos of dinosaur bones in a 7-kilogram laptop,” said Hocknull. “Better yet, we can now share these scans and knowledge online with the world,” says the researcher with satisfaction.
“We found that Australotitan cooperensis was the largest of the family, followed by Wintonotitan wattsi with large hips and long legs, while the two smallest sauropods, Diamantinasaurus matildae and Savannasaurus elliottorum were shorter in stature and heavily built,” explain the authors.
Sauropod road
The discovery of this 100-meter-long site appears to have been a sauropod road, experts say, “where dinosaurs walked trampling mud and bones to soft ground.” Some of the bones of this creature were even crushed, probably under the great weight of other sauropods, which also left their fossilized footprints on the road.
“Australia is one of the last frontiers for dinosaur discovery and Queensland is rapidly establishing itself as the nation’s paleocapital – there is still much more to discover,” experts say.
Referencia: .A. Hocknull et al. 2021. A new giant sauropod, Australotitan cooperensis gen. et sp. nov., from the mid-Cretaceous of Australia. PeerJ 9: e11317; doi: 10.7717/peerj.11317
