Our dino discoveries

IT’S not quite Jurassic Park, but paleontologists have uncovered some pretty significant evidence of Australia’s dinosaur past in recent years. While dinosaur fossils are not as common in Australia as some other countries, the discovery of pieces of fossilised bones, along with fossilised footprints, show a unique and diverse range of dinosaurs once roamed our land.

Most Australian discoveries have been in the eastern half of the country, with the first Australian dinosaur fossil found in Victoria in 1903. But there have also been finds in Western Australia and South Australia.

New discoveries of nearly complete dinosaur skeletons from Queensland are now putting Australia on the global dinosaur map and leading to additional research.

Some of the most recent research has uncovered Australia’s answer to the T-Rex. This giant predator once roamed a region of Queensland that is now home to Toowoomba, Oakey and Ipswich.

A University of Queensland study, led by paleontologist Dr Anthony Romilio, looked at southern Queensland dinosaur footprint fossils dated to the latter part of the Jurassic Period, between 165 and 151 million years ago.

“I’ve always wondered, ‘Where were Australia’s big carnivorous dinosaurs?’,” Dr Romilio says.

“But I think we’ve found them, right here in Queensland.

“The specimens of these gigantic dinosaurs were not fossilised bones, which are the sorts of things that are typically housed at museums.

“Rather, we looked at footprints which, in Australia, are much more abundant.

“These tracks were made by dinosaurs walking through the swamp forests that once occupied much of the landscape of what is now southern Queensland.”

Most of the tracks used in the study belong to theropods, the same group of dinosaurs that includes australovenator, velociraptor and their modern-day descendants: birds. Most of the footprints were 50-60cm long but some were almost 80cm.

“We estimate these tracks were made by large-bodied carnivorous dinosaurs, some of which were up to 3m high at the hips and probably around 10m long,” Dr Romilio says.

“To put that into perspective, TRex got to about 3.25m at the hips and attained lengths of 12-13m, but it didn’t appear until 90 million years after our Queensland giants.”

“At the time, these were probably some of the largest predatory dinosaurs on the planet.”

Despite the study providing important new information about Australia’s prehistoric past, the fossils are not a recent discovery.

They were found in the ceilings of coal mines in the 1950s and ’60s and had been kept in museum drawers for decades.

“Finding these fossils has been our way of tracking down the creatures from Australia’s Jurassic Park,” Dr Romilio says.

In 2015, volunteer archaeologist Jessica Parker dug up the first fossil ever found in Australia of a longnecked dinosaur called elaphrosaur.

Working on a dig site known as Eric the Red West, near Cape Otway in western Victoria, Ms Parker’s rare find of a 5cm vertebrae extended the global range of this cousin of T-Rex and velociraptor, leading experts to believe it possibly lived worldwide.

Experts know from Jurassic-era fossils found in China that these theropods had teeth when young but a beak as an adult, indicating it may have begun life as a carnivorous predator but changed to be a plant eater as it matured.

Elaphrosaur was about 2m long from head to tail, had short front arms with four fingers on each and would have been a fast runner.

In January, researchers announced they had discovered a new theropod dinosaur on a cattle property near Winton in central Queensland. The remains are thought to be about 95 million years old.

University of New England paleontologist Matt White says that while they are similar to the most complete Australian dinosaur find – the australovenator wintonensis found nearby in 2006 – key variations indicate it may be a new species. “The bones discovered are slightly larger than australovenator and show anatomical variations, indicating that they may belong to a new species,” he says.

Dr White says the breakthrough is “just the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to Australian dinosaur