Story at a glance:
- A new dinosaur was reportedly unearthed in Queensland, Australia.
- The dinosaur might have been a member of the sauropod family: “a large plant-eating dinosaur” with a long neck, small head, and stubby legs .
- The dinosaur was discovered in a site first located in 2018. It could take three to five more years to dig out more bones.
The remains of a newly-discovered dinosaur that lived in the Cretaceous period, 95 million years ago, was found in Queensland, Australia, on Tuesday.
A team of paleontologists discovered parts of a spine of what they suspect could be a member of a new herbivorous species — and quite possibly, the youngest dinosaur in the country to date, according to Newsweek.
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The discovery is particularly interesting because it came from Australia, which stemmed from the era of an ancient supercontinent called the Gondwana, made up of India, Africa, Arabia, Australia, Antarctica, Madagascar, and South America, according to Britannica and as reported by Newsweek.
“Most things found in Australia in terms of dinosaurs have a very good chance of being new to science because of the nature of how we’ve been separated from Gondwana and South America for so long,” Robyn Mackenzie, director of palaeontology for the Eromanga Natural History Museum, told Australia’s 9 News. “It’s very exciting.”
Digging 3.3 feet into the ground, Mackenzie’s team has so far unearthed the dinosaur’s vertebrae, which make up the spine, and the team is optimistic about collecting the remaining skeleton, Newsweek reports.
The entire dig could take another three to five years.
The team believes the dinosaur is a member of the sauropod family: “a large plant-eating dinosaur” with a long neck, small head, and stubby legs.
The vertebrae were discovered at a site that Mackenzie’s son and daughter-in-law found in 2018, according to Newsweek.
Eromanga, Queensland, in Australia is rich with prehistoric relics and the Eromanga dinosaurs are some of the world’s largest.
In 2007, another group of paleontologists found the remains of a 30-meter-long and 6.5-meter-tall titanosaur which is now displayed at the Eromanga Natural History Museum, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
“Over the past 17 years, many sites have been found. Slowly, each year, we go through each site,” Mackenzie said. “Because soils of the right age are exposed, we’ve actually found the dinosaur bones on top of the soil. That’s the key to finding more bones beneath the ground.”
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