Rich fossil beds in outback Queensland may shed new light on the evolution of dinosaurs in the Southern Hemisphere.

In a unique Australian-American project, researchers from The University of Queensland and Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are hoping recent fossil finds near the central-western Queensland town of Winton will help decipher the evolution of Australian dinosaurs and their relationships to those of other southern continents.

“Like its modern fauna, Australia’s dinosaurs have traditionally been thought of as very distinctive and unusual,” Dr Steve Salisbury from the University of Queensland (UQ) told me.

“Some Australian dinosaurs have been considered relics of groups that went extinct much earlier in other parts of the world, while others have been seen as early representatives of groups that are more typical of the Northern Hemisphere.

“These interpretations are not consistent with what we now know from the other southern continents.”

Links with Gondwana Land

According to Dr Salisbury and Dr Matt Lamanna, from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, it is possible that some of the dinosaur groups known from places such as South America would also have representatives in Australia.

“During the time that most of Australia’s dinosaurs existed, there is strong evidence for animals moving between many of the landmasses that once comprised the southern supercontinent of Gondwana – of which Australia was a part,” Dr Salisbury said.

“The dense fossil deposits that we are beginning to explore near Winton should help us to test some of these ideas.”

He said UQ’s connection with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History would open up new research avenues for Australian palaeontology.

Huge Dinosaur ‘Graveyard’

In July Dr Salisbury and Dr Lamanna and the UQ team discovered a dinosaur ‘graveyard’, where the ground was littered with bone fragments. In the centre of a big pit which they dug, was a large concentration of bones, including humerus, ribs and vertebrae, and the team of graduate students uncovered dozens of huge bones over the space of a couple of weeks.

In a media release issued by Queensland University, Dr Lamanna, who is the curator of one of the largest dinosaur collections in the world, that the quantity of dinosaur bones found near Winton was “spectacular.”

“This is a really exciting discovery,” he said.

“I have never worked at a site that has such a dense accumulation of bones as the one that we are now excavating near Winton. Indeed, when I was there this past July, I had to keep reminding myself that I was in Australia.

“Australian dinosaurs are extremely poorly known compared to those of all other continents except Antarctica, so literally anything we discover has the potential to be very, very significant. I can’t wait to get back.”