Queensland: A 16 feet tall and almost 100-feet long dinosaur was discovered in Australia, making it the largest found in the country. A behemoth that once stood more than 16 feet tall and was as long as a basketball court, has been confirmed as the largest dinosaur ever found in Australia. The skeleton was discovered in 2007 and is now a new classified species, called Australotitan cooperensis. Nicknamed “the southern Titan,” now ranks among the 15 largest dinosaur specimens found worldwide.
The Australotitan is a type of giant sauropod, a plant-eating subgroup characterized by their elongated necks, long tails and four trunk-like legs. These species are thought to have lived 92 million to 96 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, the scientists said.
“Australotitan adds to the growing list of uniquely Australian dinosaur species discovered in Outback Queensland,” Scott Hocknull, a vertebrate palaeoecologist at the Queensland Museum and one of the lead scientists of the new study, said. “Discoveries like this are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to find the evidence that tells the changing story of Queensland, hundreds of millions of years in the making,” he further added.
To classify Australotitan, the scientists created 3D scans of each bone and compared them to other known sauropod species in Australia and around the world.
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