New Dinosaur Alert! Unknown Species Of Titanosaur Discovered In Australia

Paleontologists have recently found the fossil remains of two dinosaurs from the long necked sauropod family. The findings, made in Australia's Queensland, threw up an unknown species of the titanosaur, called the Savannasaurus elliottorum (nicknamed Wade), which is totally new to science. The other dinosaur remains belonged to the Diamantinasaurus matildae species, and had the first skull fragments found for any sauropod in Australia.

The researchers have estimated the fossils to be around 95 million years old, and suggested they could be a key to understand how sauropod dinosaurs first arrived in Australia. "A new dinosaur like Wade, or Savannasaurus, will allow us to work out how these dinosaurs evolved through time, how they responded to climatic changes, and also how they responded to changes in the positions of the continents as well," said Stephen Poropat, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, who is also the lead researcher.

The researching team of paleontologists has suggested that the titanosaurs could have reached Australia by trekking through Antarctica. Furthermore, the first sauropods on the down under continent didn't get there until about a hundred million years ago, which made the species a late entrant compared to other types of dinosaurs that arrived tens of millions earlier. In addition, as per the researchers, Australia's sauropods could have descended from their South American counterparts that further imply that the species could have traveled by land, all the way from South America to Australia during the Cretaceous, a time period when the drifting continents were nearly in the position they are today.

According to the scientists, Antarctica was going through an ice free period due to an ancient bout of global warming that made the migratory journey possible for the dinosaurs. "By plotting the evolution of these sauropods against changes in the positions of the continents, we have possibly been able to constrain when these titanosaurs migrated," added Poropat. The paleontologist added that finding the fossils of the Savannasaurus will give a deeper insight into what the first sauropods in Australia looked like.