It’s always interesting when the remains of a dinosaur are found, but recently in Australia, a new dinosaur species was discovered and it was big news. After all, it was one of the largest dinosaurs that has ever been found.

They nicknamed the skeleton “Cooper,” after finding it in Southwest Queensland. A lot of mystery surrounds the find of the dinosaur skeleton, which took place at Cooper Creek in the Eromanga Basin in 2007.

Photo: PALEONTOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE

Although they found it over a decade ago, it has only recently been named by paleontologists.

According to a paper published in the Journal of Paleontology and Evolutionary Science, the “Australotitan cooperensis” is thought to be about 90 million years old. The Eromanga Natural History Museum shared a photo of what the dinosaur may have looked like and it’s quite impressive.

Photo: Facebook/Eromanga Natural History Museum

It belonged to one of the largest dinosaur species and is a type of dinosaur known as a titanosaur. At a length of up to 98.4 feet and a height of some 21 feet at the hip, it was quite formidable. The good news is, it likely ate plants.

According to WBALTV, the co-founder of the Eromanga Natural History Museum, Robyn Mackenzie, shared that paleontologists were able to look at the bone fragments they found and quickly recognize that it was a very large species.

Photo: PALEONTOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE

She described the pieces as being “big and chunky” and described how they compare the bones with other species found in Australia and throughout the world.

They were able to find some of the large pieces of the dinosaur mostly intact, including the pelvic bones, shoulder blades, and limbs. The Eromanga Natural History Museum shared a photo of the femur next to a Labradoodle and it’s easy to see just how massive the dinosaur was. Because of the difficulties in managing the fragile find, it did take researchers some time before they could identify the species.

Photo: Facebook/Eromanga Natural History Museum

3D scans were used to identify the bones, which were sometimes stored in museums that were hundreds of miles away from each other. They then compared those bones to those of similar species, which helped them to identify this find.

In the end, the discovery not only resulted in the find of a large dinosaur, but it also showed that there is a lot more to discover in Australia.

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