Dinosaur fossils have been found across all continents, and luckily or not, our huge friends went extinct about 66 million years ago. As for today, we have the modern birds that are related to the dinosaurs due to a common ancestor.
The word ‘Australotitan cooperensis’ may sound like an evil character from a video game who exhales fire and has a habit of kidnapping pretty girls, but it’s none other than the name of a huge dinosaur that had been roaming the surface of Earth for millions of years. CNET.com writes about the dinosaur’s discovery in Australia, and despite its huge size, the creature was nurturing itself with leaves.
The Cretaceous period was the playground of Australotitan
The Australotitan cooperensis was a titanosaur that had been wandering across the Earth during the Cretaceous period, meaning some 92 million to 96 million years ago. The creature was as long as a basketball court, marking the discovery of the biggest dinosaur that was ever found in Australia. While the name Australotitan stands for ‘southern titan’, the term ‘cooperensis’ refers to the area where the fossil was found.
Dr. Scott Hocknull, lead author of the study, declared:
Australotitan adds to the growing list of uniquely Australian dinosaur species discovered in Outback Queensland, and just as importantly showcases a totally new area for dinosaur discovery in Australia.
He also added:
To make sure Australotitan was a different species, we needed to compare its bones to the bones of other species from Queensland and globally. This was a very long and painstaking task.
The huge beast was named by palaeontologists at the Eromanga Natural History Museum and the Queensland Museum. The new findings were published in the journal PeerJ.
Tiesha loves to share her passion for everything that’s beautiful in this world. Apart from writing on her beauty blog and running her own beauty channel on Youtube, she also enjoys traveling and photography. Tiesha covers various stories on the website.