Senin, 07 Mei 2012

When dinosaurs ruled (all) the world: Tiny two-inch bone suggests Australia had the same creatures as the rest of the globe

When dinosaurs ruled (all) the world: Tiny two-inch bone suggests Australia had the same creatures as the rest of the globe

By Eddie Wrenn

PUBLISHED: 10:50 EST, 7 May 2012 | UPDATED: 17:15 EST, 7 May 2012

  • Discovery of small bone suggests the animals lived in Australia more than 125 million years ago
  • Happened when Australia was once part of the super-continent Gondwana, which broke up about between 80 and 130 million years ago

As far as we knew, Australia has always had its own eco-system, with strange animals living there which do not exist anywhere else.

But while koalas, kangeroos and other exotic fauna remain native only to their motherland, scientists have discovered a tiny dinosaur fragment, which all by itself suggests a new theory that the dinosaurs which roamed Australia are the same dinosaurs which ruled the rest of the world.

Palaeontologist Erich Fitzgerald said the two-and-a-half-inch ankle bone fossil, which was discovered in the San Remo area of Victoria, about 50 miles from Melbourne, by an amateur palaeontologist in 2009, changed current thinking on how dinosaurs spread around the globe.

World-changer: A bone from the fierce-looking ceratosaur has transformed our view of dinosaurs within Australia

World-changer: A bone from the fierce-looking ceratosaur has transformed our view of dinosaurs within Australia

The bone was from a species of carnivores known as ceratosaurs, and suggests the animals lived in Australia more than 125 million years ago.

Fitzgerald said the finding suggested that other well-known predators such as tyrannosaurus rex and allosaurs were also found in Australia.

Speaking to AFP, he said: 'The dinosaurs we see here are not unique weirdos like modern koalas and kangaroos on a global scale.

'Contrary to the modern animals we see in Australia, these meat-eating dinosaurs in Australia represent globe-trotting groups which spread out across the world before the continents began to separate.

'We've got representatives of groups that are actually found everywhere else. We really have this melting pot... where it was really a cosmopolitan bunch of dinosaurs which called Australia home 125 million years ago.'

The ceratosaur was a small, meat-eating dinosaur which grew to be one to two metres high.

There is logic to the idea - Australia was once part of the super-continent Gondwana, which broke up about between 80 and 130 million years ago.

Australia was once part of the super-continent Gondwana, which broke up about between 80 and 130 million years ago.

Australia was once part of a super-continent which broke up about between 80 and 130 million years ago.

Australia separated from the other lands and drifted south, and the other sections ended up being Antartica and India.

Fitzgerald, added: 'It had been thought that isolation played a lead role in the formation of Australia's dinosaur fauna.

'But the ceratosaur and other new discoveries show that several dinosaur groups were here. These dinosaur lineages date back to the Jurassic, 170 million years ago, when dinosaurs could walk between any two continents.

'Until now, this group of dinosaurs has been strangely absent from Australia, but now at last we know they were here - confirming their global distribution.'

Australia has a very patchy dinosaur record for a variety of reasons.

For starters - it is a large continent, with not many paleontologists looking for dinosaur bones.

Secondly, when dinosaurs ruled the world, Australia was largely covered with a shallow water, which is not as good for preserving bones as dryer climates.

There has also been little mountain-formation in Australia in the last hundred million years - which helps to churn up the surface and expose bones to those on the hunt.

Here's what other readers have said. Why not add your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.

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I thought that at that time there was NO Australia the land was mostly joined onto one big land mass or had just started to drift away . I could be wrong ??

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Dinosaurs roamed and ruled the earth for over 60 million years... Humans will kill themselves (and the planet) in less than 1 million.... We really are the clever ones eh?

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Those who claim that evolution has not been proved should note that finds such as these are predicted by the theories both of evolution and of plate tectonics, as well as by classical geology . The ability to make predictions (which are subsequently found to be correct) is a key element in the testing of any scientific theory.

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