Australia's Largest Ever Dinosaur Skeleton
October 10, 2001Queensland Museum palaeontologists have confirmed the discovery of Australia's largest dinosaur in central western Queensland, Minister for the Arts Matt Foley announced today. Mr Foley said the partial remains of the dinosaur - which roamed Queensland 95 million years ago - were the largest found to date in Australia.
"This is a great coup for the Queensland Museum. It reaffirms the Museum as the centre for dinosaur studies in Australia and Queensland as the home of the country's largest and most important dinosaur finds," Mr Foley said. "It is an extremely exciting find and more work will be done to establish the full extent of the discovery and to study the animal in detail. "Internationally important items like this belong in museums where they can be studied, interpreted and fully understood."
Dubbed "Elliot" (all major dinosaur finds receive a nickname) the fossilised remains of the massive dinosaur were discovered in 1999 on a remote sheep station near Winton in central western Queensland. The name of the grazier and the location of the discovery will be kept secret to protect the site from unscrupulous collectors.
The dinosaur would have stretched the length of five cars and been able to look in the window of a second floor apartment. The nature of the recently identified bones indicates that Elliot was a sauropod. Sauropods were gigantic, four-legged plant-eating dinosaurs, characterised by extremely long necks and tails, and disproportionately small heads.
The scientists have so far found part of the thighbone, ribs and portions of the backbone. Almost half a metre across, the piece of the thighbone forms the upper part of the knee joint. With a total length of 1.5 to 1.7 metres, the complete thighbone would have been as tall as a family fridge.
Based on the size of his thighbone, scientists estimate Elliot would have been almost four metres high at the hips and 16 to 21 metres long. At this size he would have weighed as much as five African elephants. All the bones collected so far have come from the surface. But the researchers believe that many more bones, including some of the smaller, more fragile parts of the skeleton, such as the skull, await discovery below the surface. It is anticipated that Elliot will be the most complete sauropod ever found in Australia.
The Cretaceous in Queensland
The Cretaceous age (145 to 65 Million years ago) was a time of great global change, culminating in the extinction of the dinosaurs. For Queensland the most important slice of this time was between 130 and 95 Million years ago when much of the sediment which filled the Great Artesian Basin was deposited.
Elliot comes from a period of time called the Cretaceous, about 95 million years ago. The eastern coastal highlands were then dominated by a large, violent, active volcanic region, now only preserved in the rocks of the Whitsunday Islands. From this region came the great volumes of sediment which now form the Cretaceous rocks of the Great Artesian Basin.
The sea flooded the centre of the continent at least four times during this period, but it is the rocks formed during the period 110-95 Million years ago that contain the majority of Australian Dinosaur remains. At this time the continent was much further south than at present, with Queensland straddling 55°S. The climate was temperate, a fact borne out by strong seasonality in the growth rings of fossil wood .
The new discovery comes from the last flooding, 98-95 Million years ago, which deposited sediment from rivers, lakes and streams on a vast flat plain stretching from the eastern highlands to the Boulia district. The sediment is now known as the Winton Formation
Though the climate was cool, the vegetation was relatively lush. On the plains were great open temperate forests of conifers, ferns, ginkgoes and cycads, - and the first shrub-like flowering plants. These are known from the many fossil plants found in the Winton Formation.
Work at the Site
The Queensland Museum Palaeontology and Geology lab staff and volunteers have already begun to ascertain the site's full potential.
In early September QM palaeontologists and volunteers returned to where the thighbone of Elliot was first discovered and began a painstaking process of mapping the site and hunting for more bones. The group pegged whatever fragments of bone they could find lying on the surface. A grid was laid out so that any bones that were found could be mapped into a GIS (Geographic Information System). This system will allow palaeontologists to determine where the greatest concentrations of bones are and thus where to start digging. The grid was big - seven times the size of a rugby field. It is Australia's largest ever dinosaur excavation and one of the biggest fossil grids on the planet.
Toward the end of the trip the team had uncovered hundreds of bone fragments but they had not found enough to know whether the rest of Elliot's skeleton was still under the ground. As luck would have it, on the last day of the trip a miraculous discovery was made!
An extract from Steve Salisbury's field diary captures the feeling at the time:
Tuesday, 18 September 2001
"Pay day!! While Scott, Alex and myself were looking for pieces of lungfish in a paddock near the homestead, 'Bruce' finally made the breakthrough we'd all been hanging for with the tractor. About half a metre from where Deb, Alex and I were digging our quadrats, he found the beautifully preserved head of Elliot's right femur! He'd been continuing the trench in the same line as the day before, and hadn't really found anything more than fragments in the first half dozen scoops, but, as he recalls, all of a sudden the tractor lurched as it hit something large and hard. He stopped and then continued to carefully remove whatever it was the scoop had hit. Sure enough, when he emptied out the scoop's contents in the over-burden pile, there it was: the femoral head, solid as a rock with only a few pieces of clay still clinging to it. In the same scoop he'd also uncovered what I later worked out to be was the remainder of the shaft. It was fairly badly squashed and had broken into numerous fragments, but it was intact enough for us to dig around it and place it in a plaster jacket.
Could we have asked for anything more? I doubt it. Elliot's femur is now complete, and best of all, the missing pieces were exactly where we thought they'd be. Just how much more is still buried? Lots, lots more, if today's results are anything to go by. And wouldn't you know it - all this and it's our last day in the field! Guess it's a good way to end things."
Source: Queensland Museum