Australian dinosaur that lived 98M years ago
found
CANBERRA, Australia - Scientists have confirmed for the first
time that Australia was once home to a dinosaur that was big, fast
and terrifying, and they've named it like something from an Arnold
Schwarzenegger movie. Meet the Australovenator.
The beast was a 1,100 pound (500 kilogram) meat-eating predator
with three slashing claws on each of its powerful forelimbs that
stalked the Outback 98 million years ago, researchers said in a
report published Friday.
Fossilized remnants of its limb bones, ribs, jaw and fangs were
found _ along with bones of two other new species of gigantic,
long-necked herbivores weighing up to 22 tons (20 metric tons) _ in
Queensland state over the past three years.
The discovery, analyzed in a 51-page report published in the
peer-reviewed online science journal PLoS ONE, was the first
substantial find of large dinosaurs in Australia to be revealed in
28 years.
Paleontologists have described Australia as new frontier in
vertebrate paleontology and an untapped resource in the world's
understanding of the dinosaur age because so few fossils have been
found there. This is largely because the relatively flat continent
has long been geologically stable. The movement of tectonic plates
in other continents has forced layers of rock bearing fossils tens
of millions of years old to the surface making them easier to
find.
In the latest Queensland find, paleontologists bulldozed top
soil more than three feet (a meter) deep to expose the sandy clay
that held the fossils.
The finders nicknamed the 16-foot (5-meter) long carnivore,
Australovenator wintonensis (pronounced oss-tra-low-VEN'-ah-tor
win-TON'-en-sis), "Banjo," after the poet A.B. "Banjo" Paterson who
in 1885 penned Australia's unofficial anthem "Waltzing Matilda" on
a sheep ranch near Winton _ a cattle town that lies closest to
where the dinosaur bones were found. Banjo's Latin name means
"Winton's Southern Hunter."
"The cheetah of his time, Banjo was light and agile," the
report's lead author, Scott Hocknull, a Queensland Museum
paleontologist, said in a statement.
"He's Australia's answer to Velociraptor, but many times bigger
and more terrifying," Hocknull added, referring to the turkey-sized
prehistoric predators recreated with artistic license in the
"Jurassic Park" movies.
The other two finds _ 52-foot- (16-meter-) long herbivores _
were previously unknown types of titanosaur, the largest dinosaurs
that ever lived. The giraffe-like Wintonotitan wattsi (pronounced
win-ton-oh-TIE-tan wot-SIGH) and nicknamed Clancy translates from
Latin as "Watts' Winton Giant." The Diamantinasaurus matildae
(pronounced dye-man-TEEN'-ah-sor-us mah-TIL'-day) resembled a
hippopotamus and has been nicknamed Matilda; the Latin name
translates as "Matilda's Diamantina River Lizard."
All three lived in the mid-Cretaceous period which extended from
145 million years to 65 million years ago.
Matilda's and Banjo's bones were mingled; Hocknull suspects
Matilda became stuck in river mud and that Banjo fell into the same
fatal trap while moving in for the kill.
"The jewel in the crown for us is Banjo because it's the most
complete meat-eating dinosaur ever found in Australia," Hocknull
said.
"All of the carnivorous dinosaurs that we've had in the past
were only known from a single bone or tooth," he added.
John Long, a Museum Victoria paleontologist who was not
connected with the find, said it was "very exciting stuff."
Long said the last "truly big" dinosaur found in Australia was
the partial skeleton of a 30-foot- (9-meter-) long herbivore named
Muttaburrasaurus which was found near the Queensland town of
Muttaburra in 1981.
Long said only single large dinosaur bones had been found since
then.
"This is the first time we've got partially articulated
skeletons," Long said. "There is enough of the bones to reconstruct
them quite confidently."
"We know so little about the Australian dinosaur fauna that any
major paper like this is a massive advance on our previous
knowledge," he said.
Hocknull said his team would continue unearthing more bones of
the three dinosaurs as well as other sites in the Winton area,
where fossil bones have been found scattered on the surface since
the 1930s.
--AP
OMSG...[Oh My Shocking God]
