A giant 30-meter dinosaur that weighed almost 75 tons during its lifetime, discovered by paleontologists in southwestern Queensland, turned out to be a representative of a species previously unknown to science.
Experts at the Queensland Museum and Eromanga Natural History Museum described it as Australotitan cooperensis.
«To make sure Australotitan was a different species, we needed to compare its bones to the bones of other species from Queensland and globally. This was a very long and painstaking task.» said paper author and palaeontologist Scott Hocknull of the Queensland Museum.
The team of researchers used new digital technologies to 3D scan each bone of the Australotitan, and then compare them with the closest relatives of the southern titanium.
'The 3-D scans we created allowed me to carry around thousands of kilos of dinosaur bones in a 7 kilogram laptop. Better yet, we can now share these scans and knowledge online with the world,' Dr Hocknull said.
In addition to describing the Australotitan, the researchers also found other discoveries in the Eromanga area that await further study, Dr Hocknull said.
The full findings of the study were published in the journal PeerJ.