Giants of our past
The bones of two titanosaurs displayed at the Queensland Museum for the first time this year represent a species never before found in Australia and they are expected to be a species different from titanosaurs found elsewhere in the world.
The bones of Cooper and George, as they’ve been called, were found near Eromanga in south west Queensland in 2005 and 2006.
Titanosaurs were plant eating dinosaurs with extremely long necks and tails, massive bodies and elephant-like legs. They roamed what’s now the dry Queensland inland about 95 million years ago.
They were the largest land-dwelling animals that have ever been identified on earth and Cooper and George are the largest dinosaurs found in Australia so far – measuring up to 26 metres in length.
That’s at least six metres longer than Elliot, the sauropod whose remains were found further to the north, at Winton, in 1999. Elliot, until now, was the largest dinosaur known to have inhabited Queensland and lived about two to five million years before Cooper and George.
Museum officials believe that the discoveries could spark off a ‘dinosaur rush’ in Australia, 150 years after the hunt for fossils took off in Europe and America.
The new fossil-rich sites are part of the Winton formation, a large sequence of rocks from the age of the dinosaurs which spans Queensland’s interior.
At least seven sites have been identified from hundreds of bone fragments since the first fossil was uncovered, according to Scott Hocknull, Curator of Geosciences at the Queensland Museum.
George and Cooper flourished at a time when Australia was part of Gondwana and titanosaur fossils have also been found in Africa and South America.
Many more sites near Eromanga are still to be excavated and further digs are being undertaken.
Website: http://www.southbank.qm.qld.gov.au
Last reviewed 24 July 2007
