Dinosaur fossils are harder to find in Australia than elsewhere in the world because of our geology, says Herne. Our continent has been subject to 30-odd million years of erosion and weathering, so palaeontologists have smaller areas of suitable exposed rock to look at when searching for fossils.
Fragmentary fossil record
Most Australian dinosaurs come from the eastern half of Australia (Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria) although isolated dinosaur bones have been found in Western Australia and South Australia.
Murgon is significant as the only site in Australia that records a diverse vertebrate fauna dating from the early Tertiary Period (55 million years ago), approximately ten million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The first remains of a tyrannosaurus that stalked the southern continents have been identified by scientists from a distinctive hip bone blasted from a cliff face in Australia.
But fossils are rare since the conditions have to be right for them to form. First, sediment like mud or sand covers an animal's body, and the soft tissues rot away leaving behind the hard tissue—teeth and bones. Over time, the sediment hardens into rock encasing the bones, often distorting them.
Hadrosaurus lived about 80 million years ago late in the Cretaceous Period. Hadrosaurus is a famous dinosaur because it was the most complete dinosaur skeleton unearthed anywhere in the world when it was discovered and scientifically documented in 1858.
According to the Bible, dinosaurs must have been created by God on the sixth day of creation. Genesis 1:24 says, “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”
Scientists have unearthed a 100-million year-old dinosaur fossil in Western Queensland. The Elasmosaurus was commonly found across inland parts of Australia and is the world's first discovery of the dinosaur fully intact.
Dinosaur fossils are not as common in Australia as some other countries, but there is good evidence it was home to many large and small dinosaurs, which lived in the forest and wetlands.
The 14-kilometre-wide asteroid punched a massive hole in Earth's crust and sent a cloud of ash and dust into the atmosphere. As the planet plunged into darkness and acid rain fell in the months and years that followed, about three-quarters of plants and animals – including most dinosaurs – were snuffed out.
The 'catastrophists' believe the mass extinction happened suddenly due to a meteorite impact. The 'gradualists' consider it was prolonged and caused by climate change or volcanic activity, with the meteorite only providing the final blow.
To get to Australia, giant dinosaurs known as titanosaurs may have had to trek across an even more down-under continent: Antarctica. That's the conclusion drawn by a new family tree for sauropods, a group of herbivorous long-necked dinosaurs that includes the largest land animals to ever walk the Earth.
Our continent has been subject to 30-odd million years of erosion and weathering, so palaeontologists have smaller areas of suitable exposed rock to look at when searching for fossils.
Vegetation. Towering conifer forests covered much of Australia. Smaller plants such as ferns, gingkoes, cycads, clubmosses and horsetails created an understorey. The first flowering plants had begun to bloom.
During the Cretaceous period Australia was hot and basically separated up into a number of landmasses separated by great shallow seas. That is why many of Australia's dinosaurs were sea-living beasts like Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs. 65 - 23.3 million years ago.
Scientists have excavated the first near-complete skull of a sauropod to ever be found in Australia. Nicknamed “Ann,” the long-necked specimen is just the fourth of the species Diamantinasaurus matildae ever uncovered.
Ozraptor is the oldest dinosaur in Australia known from a fossil bone, but all that is preserved is the lower portion of a left shinbone. It has proven quite difficult to determine the place of Ozraptor on the theropod family tree, let alone how big it was or what it looked like.
Recent dinosaur discoveries in Australia
An unprecedented fossil of a baby dinosaur curled up perfectly inside its egg is shedding more light on the links between dinosaurs and birds.
Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed Even if you knew that, you may not know how the fictional dinosaur came to star in the prehistoric landscape of popular imagination for so long.
The first skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex was discovered in 1902 in Hell Creek, Montana, by the Museum's famous fossil hunter Barnum Brown. Six years later, Brown discovered a nearly complete T. rex skeleton at Big Dry Creek, Montana.
The world's biggest dinosaur footprint has been discovered in northwestern Australia, measuring at nearly 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 meters), the lead author of a study said. The track belonged to a sauropod, a long-necked herbivore.
If he says, “Well, darling, you know the Bible says Adam and Eve were the first people God made, so that means they came first,” then the child is conflicted with the science she's studying, which tells her the caveman evolved from lower forms of life.
Scientists already know that an asteroid—or perhaps a comet—struck Earth off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The resulting 110 miles/80 kilometers wide Chicxulub crater is thought to have caused a decades-long “impact winter” that killed the dinosaurs.
Investigating a new species
The dinosaur's genus name — Iani — is a nod to its changing world. It references the two-faced Janus, the Roman god of transitions, the study authors reported.