Queensland, Gatra.com- A recently described long-necked dinosaur that was as long as a basketball court and hip as tall as a two-story building was the largest animal to ever walk in Australia, a new study finds. Paleontologists discovered the giant creature — a titanosaur, the largest long-necked sauropod dinosaur — in outback Queensland. They named it Australotitan cooperensis, or “titan south of Cooper” — referring to the Cooper Creek system where it was found. But the team called him “Cooper”. Live Science, 9/6.
While alive, Cooper would stand about 21 feet (6.5 meters) tall at his hips and measured up to 98 feet (30 m) from his snout to the tip of his tail. It likely weighed between 25 and 82 tons (23 and 74 metric tons), or the equivalent of 1,400 red kangaroos, the researchers wrote in a blog post. This metric means that plant-eating Cooper is among the 10 to 15 largest dinosaur species in the world, the researchers said.
The Cooper fossil was first discovered in 2004 by 14-year-old Sandy Mackenzie, son of study senior author Robyn Mackenzie, director at the Eromanga Museum of Natural History. The fossilized bones of giant dinosaurs are in the Winton Formation, west of the city of Eromanga, and researchers have spent most of this time excavating and studying the many fossil bones.
“To ensure Australotitan are different species, we need to compare bones against bones of other species from Queensland and globally,” study first author Scott Hocknull, a vertebrate paleontologist and senior curator of geology at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, said in a statement. long and tiring.”
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