Australia fossil discovery prompts rethink of dinosaur history
‘Rex’ the giant salt water crocodile settles into his new purpose-built habitat at Sydney Wildlife World on December 22, 2009. Weighing in at over 700kg and measuring nearly 5 metres in length, the former rogue predator from Kakadu National Park in far-northern Australia is one of the largest of its kind in the world. A fossil from a crocodile-faced dinosaur species called the Spinosaurus was recently found in Australia, the first time that the remains of this dinosaur has been found Down Under.
A neck vertebra from a dinosaur with the snout of a crocodile has been found in Australia, showing that the creature had a much wider range than previously thought, scientists say.
The neck bone fossil belonged to a spinosaur dinosaur that lived "Down Under" about 105 million years ago.
It is the first time that remains of the Spinosaurus have been found in Australia. Previously, the fearsome carnivore known as the “spine lizard” was only thought to live in Europe, South America and South Africa.
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The vertebra from what was likely a juvenile, 6.6-foot spinosaur dinosaur was found in 2005 near southern Victoria's Cape Otway lighthouse. It took two years to identify the 2-inch-wide bone fragment as two thirds of a Spinosaurus vertebra, Australian newspaper the Geelong Advertiser reports.
A paper by researcher Thomas Rich, published in Biology Letters, said the fossil discovery challenges the idea that Australia’s animals were endemic to the area in the Early Cretaceous period, Agence France-Presse reports.
"The fact that they existed in Australia changes our understanding of the evolution of this group of dinosaurs," said Rich, a senior curator at Museum Victoria. "The same groups of dinosaurs were widespread when the Earth was once a supercontinent."
"When the Earth evolved into separate continents, the various families of dinosaurs had already reached those landmasses, which explains why the same ones have been found in places now far apart from one another," Rich told AFP.
The Spinosaurus could grow up to 59 feet long and weigh up to 21 tons, rivaling the Tyrannosaurus Rex in size. The dinosaur was thought to live on both land and in water, and its crocodile-like snout was likely used to prey on fish.
The location of the fossil discovery was probably a flood plain in a rift valley created as Australia and Antarctica were breaking apart, the BBC reports.
The dinosaur's snout would have been well suited for pulling fish out of the waters on this plain.
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