A new dinosaur was discovered in Australia
Lesson summary
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Coming up today, the biggest animal ever to roam Australia’s Outback is the “Australotitan cooperensis.” If you’ve never heard of the dinosaur before, that’s because it’s brand-new, well, new to us that is. A team of scientists published the newly discovered dinosaur’s official name and description after discovering its bones in 2007. In today’s lesson, you’ll meet the newest addition to the catalog of dinosaurs that once roamed the Earth. In the second half of today’s lesson, I’ll show you how to use the English expression “named after,” and we have a quote of the week. Let’s dive in!
New Dinosaur in Australia
A new species of dinosaur was officially classified and named the “Australotitan cooperensis,” in a newly released paper in the scientific journal PeerJ. If its name is a mouthful , we can call this dinosaur by its nickname—”Cooper,” named after Cooper Creek, near the town of Eromangan in the Australian state of Queensland, where its fossils were discovered . Cooper is the largest dinosaur species ever found in Australia and one of the largest animals to have lived on the Earth.
Based on its skeleton , scientists have confirmed Cooper was between 25 and 30 meters long, about the length of a basketball court , and 16 to 21 feet tall, about the size of a two-story building . Its estimated weight was up to 81 tons; that’s twice the weight of a fully-loaded tractor-trailer truck . And that would make it one of the fifteen largest dinosaurs ever discovered. Drawings released by the Queensland and Eromangan Natural History Museums show a creature with an extremely long, curved neck ; a small head; a long tail ; a strong middle; and four thick, trunk-like legs . Despite being so large, Cooper only ate plants when it was alive. Plus, it’s the largest animal ever discovered in Australia and lived between 96 and 92 million years ago.
The bones were discovered by two dinosaur researchers , Robyn and Stuart Mackenzie, on their own property near the town of Eromanga. They have discovered previous species of dinosaurs on their property before and founded the Eromanga Natural History Museum. They were also heavily involved in the study of Cooper and the eventual classification that became Australotitan cooperensis.
Though the fossils were discovered fourteen years ago, the dinosaur was only officially described in a scientific journal this week. Describing and classifying a new species always takes time, but this one was especially difficult. The fossils were in an extremely remote location . Though they were largely intact , the fossils were delicate ; it took years to prepare and clean them for study. And even then, scientists needed to make sure the fossils didn’t belong to an already classified species of dinosaur. To do that, they had to compare the bones to all other species of bones that have been discovered on Earth, which was a painstaking process .
However, modern technology certainly helped. Today’s 3D scanning technology allows researchers to compare fossils against an international database of other species. Before the technology existed , they would have had to fly around the world and examine fossils of other species in person. One scientist said that the super-high-resolution scans are “like having the real bone in your computer.”
Biologists classify living things into a nine-level classification system , where the highest point is all of life on earth and the lowest is the species. The classification just above the species is called the “ genus ,” and the official name of an animal is its genus (capitalized) and its species (not capitalized), and both are in Latin. So, the new dinosaur’s name is “Australotitan cooperensis;” the genus Australotitan means “Southern Titan.” For now, it has only one species, but that might change soon.
The new dinosaur also has a cousin , which is likely to be another species in the Australotitan genus. That dinosaur has yet to be classified officially; its nickname is George, and its skeleton is not as intact as Cooper’s was, contributing to a delay in describing and naming it officially.
Paleontologists noticed that Cooper’s bones had been crushed , almost as if he had been trampled on after he died. He was found in an area where clay had been flattened and eventually solidified into rock . As a result, scientists think this was a heavily trafficked area where dinosaurs went to drink from a freshwater source.
Large dinosaurs like Cooper have been found on every continent, but the very biggest dinosaurs ever discovered have all been found in South America and primarily in the Patagonia region. This discovery means that the largest dinosaurs were also present in other regions. Queensland, where Cooper was found, was still attached to Antarctica when Cooper lived. It was probably also attached to the southern tip of South America, meaning that the largest dinosaurs roamed an enormous landmass in the Earth’s southern hemisphere . Because of this realization, scientists are now thinking of conducting focused discovery missions in Antarctica to see if they can find similar large dinosaur fossils.
A dinosaur-sized coincidence
A few things. First of all, it sounded to me like an amazing coincidence that the bones were discovered by two dinosaur researchers on their own farm. I mean, what are the chances that dinosaur bones would be on the property of a dinosaur researcher? But I looked at the aerial image of Eromangan on Google Maps and it looks like what I imagine the surface of Mars looks like. So, I quickly realized that the reason dinosaur researchers own land in this area is that it’s likely to contain dinosaur fossils. It’s not like they were planting tomatoes and squash in a normal residential area and happened upon dinosaur bones. But these two researchers, having found dinosaur bones in the area before, founded a Natural History Museum right there in this tiny town, and took a leading role in describing and classifying this new species. That’s pretty cool.
Second thing. Ninety-six million years ago! Bones were preserved for that long. I am just in awe at, A, how scientists can know something is so old, and B, how they preserve , clean, and assemble bones so old. It’s absolutely incredible.
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