Meet the Massive Australotitan, the “Southern Titan” – Australia’s Largest Dinosaur!

Australotitan is Australia’s biggest dinosaur, uncovered through 3D scans and fossilized sauropod footprints in Queensland.

It is time to meet Australotitan cooperensis, a new species of giant sauropod from Eromanga in southwest Queensland. Australotitan, the “Southern Titan of the Cooper,” named after where it was found, has been scientifically described by paleontologists and staff at Queensland Museum and the Eromanga Natural History Museum.

The fossilized skeleton was originally nicknamed ‘Cooper’ after the nearby Cooper Creek where it was first discovered by the Mackenzie property owners and excavated with Queensland Museum in 2007. Finding ‘Cooper’ has changed the lives of the Mackenzie family and has led to the establishment of the Eromanga Natural History Museum.

Australotitan belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as the titanosaurians, which were the last surviving group of long-necked sauropods and the largest known land-dwelling animals to have ever existed. Australotitan is now the largest known dinosaur species from Australia, making it the largest land animal to have ever walked in outback Queensland and sits within the top 10 to 15 largest dinosaurs in the world. It is estimated to have reached a height of 5 to 6.5 meters (16 to 21 feet) at the hip and length of 25 to 30 meters (82 to 98 feet) – as long as a basketball court! It may have weighed anywhere between 23 and 74 tons, the equivalent of 1,400 red kangaroos!

The study found that all four of the sauropod dinosaurs that lived in Australia around the same time (96 to 92 million years ago) were more closely related to one another than they were to other dinosaurs found elsewhere. To check Australotitan was a different species, its bones needed to be compared with the bones of other species in Queensland and globally. Not exactly an easy task when dealing with fragile and very heavy bones that are kept in museums 100s to 1000s of kilometers apart.

For the first time, the team used new digital technology to capture each bone in 3-D and compare it to the bones of its closest relatives. Many of these digital ‘cybertypes’ will form part of Queensland Museum’s digital collection, powered by Project DIG, a partnership between Queensland Museum Network and BHP.

The digital capturing process has also led to some remarkable discoveries. It has been found that several of ‘Cooper’s’ bones were crushed by the footsteps of other sauropod dinosaurs. This can be seen in a sauropod trample zone found during the excavation of ‘Cooper’. The team found a rock shelf, almost 100 meters (330 feet) long, representing a sauropod pathway. The footprints of sauropods have been preserved trampling through the mud and even the bones of another smaller sauropod in the soft ground. This work has been forming fascinating studies in dinosaur trace fossils around Queensland.

The scientific publication marks a seventeen-year-long culmination of the joint effort between Queensland Museum and Eromanga Natural History Museum paleontologists, geologists, fossil preparators, and most importantly, volunteers. Australotitan adds to the growing list of uniquely Australian dinosaur species discovered in outback Queensland, and just as importantly showcases a totally new area for dinosaur discovery in Australia.

Stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes stories of Queensland dinosaur discoveries!

Project DIG is a partnership between Queensland Museum and BHP that will scan our collections and digitize our research for people worldwide.

Written by Rochelle Lawrence, Senior Research Assistant, and Scott Hocknull, Senior Curator, Geosciences, Queensland Museum.

Reference: “A new giant sauropod, Australotitan cooperensis gen. et sp. nov., from the mid-Cretaceous of Australia” by Scott A. Hocknull​, Melville Wilkinson, Rochelle A. Lawrence, Vladislav Konstantinov, Stuart Mackenzie and Robyn Mackenzie, 7 June 2021, PeerJ.
DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11317

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